LIBRARY 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

SANTA  BARBARA 


PRESENTED  BY 

Marie  B.    Wol ford 


WAR  AND  INSURANCE 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  •    BOSTON   •    CHICAGO  •    DALLAS 
ATLANTA  •    SAN  FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  LIMITED 

LONDON  •    BOMBAY  •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  LTD. 

TORONTO 


WAR  AND  INSURANCE 


AN  ADDRESS 

DELIVERED   BEFORE   THE   PHILOSOPHICAL  UNION 

OF  THE   UNIVERSITY   OF   CALIFORNIA   AT   ITS 

TWENTY-FIFTH   ANNIVERSARY   AT   BERKELEY 

CALIFORNIA,    AUGUST   27,    1914 


BY 

JOSIAH  ROYCE 

ALFOBD   PROFESSOR  OF  NATURAL  RELIGION,  MORAL 

PHILOSOPHY  AND   CIVIL  POLITY   AT 

HARVARD  UNIVERSITY 


WITH  AN  INTRODUCTION 
AND  NOTES 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1914 

All  rights  reserved 


COPYRIGHT,  1914, 
BY  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 


Set  up  and  electrotyped.    Published  October,  1914. 


Nortoooto  tyrees 

J.  8.  Gushing  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 
Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


LifOfUUlI 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFOR 
SANTA  BARBARA 


PREFACE 

As  a  preparation  for  an  address  which  I 
had  been  invited  to  deliver  on  the  occasion 
of  the  twenty -fifth  anniversary  of  the  Philo- 
sophical Union  of  the  University  of  Cali- 
fornia, I  read  to  a  general  audience,  at  the 
summer  session  of  that  University  at  Berke- 
ley (during  the  last  fortnight  of  July,  in  the 
present  year)  a  series  of  six  philosophical 
lectures.  These  six  preparatory  lectures 
contained  a  restatement  of  the  theory  of 
what  I  had  called,  in  a  recent  book  of  mine, 
the  "  Process  of  Interpretation,"  and,  in  par- 
ticular, discussed  the  nature  and  functions 
of  "  Communities  of  Interpretation."  What 
this  last  term  means  the  reader  of  this  present 
book  may  learn,  if  he  pleases,  on  pages  47-64. 

I  had  intended  to  continue  and  to  sum- 
marize the  main  theses  of  these  six  lectures 
in  my  anniversary  address  before  the  Union. 

iii 


PREFACE 

The  summer  session  ended.    The  war  began. 

My  address,  in  the  form  in  which  I  had 
intended  to  read  it,  was  thus  rendered  use- 
less, and  was  thrown  aside.  But  the  theory 
both  of  the  "process  of  interpretation"  and 
of  "  the  communities  of  interpretation  "  had, 
during  the  last  two  years,  seemed  to  me  ca- 
pable of  a  wide  range  of  practical  applica- 
tions ;  and  some  of  these,  including  a  sketch 
of  certain  very  general  philosophical  aspects 
of  banking  and  of  insurance,  had  been  already 
presented  to  my  audience  at  Berkeley  during 
the  July  lectures  just  mentioned. 

Abandoning,  then,  my  previous  plans  for 
the  address  before  the  Union,  I  wrote  this 
present  address,  —  partly  in  the  neighborhood 
of  Los  Gatos,  in  the  Santa  Cruz  mountains 
of  the  California  Coast  Range,  and  partly 
at  Berkeley.  This  writing  took  place  be- 
tween August  2  and  August  27,  under  the 
immediate  influence  of  impressions  due  to  the 
events  which  each  day's  news  then  brought 
to  the  notice  of  us  all;  and  yet  with  a 
longing  to  see  how  the  theory  of  "  interpre- 

iv 


PREFACE 

tation"  which  I  owe  to  the  logical  studies  of 
the  late  Mr.  Charles  Peirce,  would  bear  the 
test  of  an  application  to  the  new  problems 
which  the  war  brings  to  our  minds. 

I  have  to  thank  my  friend,  Mr.  John  Gra- 
ham Brooks,  of  Cambridge,  Massachusetts, 
as  well  as  my  colleague,  Mr.  H.  B.  Dow  (lec- 
turer on  Insurance  at  Harvard  University) ; 
and,  above  all,  my  philosophical  colleague 
at  the  University  of  California,  Professor 
Charles  H.  Rieber  (who  was  my  host  while 
I  was  at  Berkeley,  and  who  is  also  the  presi- 
dent of  the  Philosophical  Union),  for  some 
careful  criticisms  of  this  address;  and  for 
their  aid  in  preparing  it  for  publication. 

JOSIAH  ROYCE. 

CAMBRIDGE,  MASSACHUSETTS, 
September  15,  1914. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 


ADDRESS  ON  WAR  AND  INSURANCE 


SECTION  J'A'iK 

I.    THE  UTOPIA  OF  UNIVERSAL  PEACE    .        .  4 

II.    THE  NEIGHBOR  :   LOVE  AND  HATE     .        .  12 

III.  THE  DANGEROUS  SOCIAL  RELATIONS  AND 

COMMUNITIES 28 

IV.  THE  COMMUNITY  OF  INTERPRETATION       .  42 
V.    SPECIAL  COMMUNITIES  OF  INTERPRETATION  55 

VI.    MUTUAL  INTERNATIONAL  INSURANCE         .  65 

NOTES 

I.    STEINMETZ'S  "  PHILOSOPHY  OF  WAR  "       .  83 
II.    KANT'S   DOCTRINE   CONCERNING   "ANTAG- 
ONISM "  AS  A  SOURCE  OF  SOCIAL  DE- 
VELOPMENT    83 

III.  LOVE  FOR  COMMUNITIES     ....  85 

IV.  EFFORTS  ALREADY  MADE  TO  USE  THE  FOUR 

COMMUNITIES  OF  INTERPRETATION  IN 

INTERNATIONAL  AFFAIRS      ...  86 

V.     "THE  FIRST  ACT  OF  WAR"  93 


Vll 


INTRODUCTION 

TITT'HEN  a  number  of  persons  are  subject 
to  risks,  they  may  contribute  to  a 
common  fund,  and  then  use  this  fund  as  a 
means  of  making  good  certain  of  the  losses 
which,  in  consequence  of  these  risks,  fall  upon 
one  or  another  member  of  the  company  of 
adventurers  who  thus  contribute.  The  con- 
tributions themselves  form  an  insurance  fund. 
The  method  of  business  in  question  con- 
stitutes the  basis  of  the  modern  institution 
called  insurance.  The  special  ways  in  which 
the  adventurers  are  brought  into  association, 
and  the  sorts  of  risk  against  which  the  indi- 
vidual members  of  a  group  of  insurers  are 
protected,  vary  widely.  But  at  the  basis  of 
any  systematic  modern  method  of  insurance 
lie  considerations  which  belong  to  the  general 
theory  of  probability,  and  which  are  every- 
where in  question  in  the  statistical  sciences. 
Since  risks,  and  the  adventures  of  individual 

ix 


INTRODUCTION 

men,  are  amongst  the  most  practical  matters 
with  which  we  are  acquainted,  while  the 
theory  of  probability  and  the  principles  of 
statistical  science  involve  some  of  the  most 
abstruse  problems  of  logic  and  mathematics, 
insurance,  viewed  either  as  a  mode  of  business 
or  as  a  social  institution,  is  one  of  the  most 
momentous  instances  of  the  union  of  very 
highly  theoretical  enterprises  with  very  con- 
crete social  applications. 

Furthermore,  as  experience  shows,  the 
insurance  principle  comes  to  be  more  and  more 
used  and  useful  in  modern  affairs.  Not  only 
does  it  serve  the  ends  of  individuals,  or  of 
special  groups  of  individuals.  It  tends  more 
and  more  both  to  pervade  and  to  transform 
our  modern  social  order.  It  brings  into  new 
syntheses  not  merely  pure  and  applied  science, 
but  private  and  public  interests,  individual 
prudence,  and  a  large  regard  for  the  general 
welfare,  thrift,  and  charity.  It  discourages 
recklessness  and  gambling.  It  contributes 
to  the  sense  of  stability.  It  quiets  fears  and 
encourages  faithfulness. 

x 


INTRODUCTION 

But  this  principle  of  insurance  has  not  yet 
been  applied  to  international  affairs,  and,  in 
so  far  as  the  present  writer  is  aware,  no  one 
has  heretofore  proposed  that  a  group  of  nations 
should  form  an  organization  for  the  mutual 
insurance  of  its  members  against  any  kind  of 
risks. 

The  present  essay  offers  reasons  why  such 
a  proposal  is  both  timely  and  feasible.  Since 
the  whole  subject  is  new,  what  is  attempted 
in  this  brief  discussion  cannot  be  a  mature 
plan.  This  paper  is  preliminary,  is  tentative, 
and  intends  to  be  subject  to  a  thoroughgoing 
revision.  Its  whole  present  purpose  is  gained, 
in  fact,  if  it  leads  to  a  serious  revision  of  its 
own  imperfections.  It  wishes  to  attract  the 
attention  of  some  wiser  minds  than  that  of 
its  author  to  the  fact  that,  at  the  moment  of 
an  unprecedented  crisis  in  the  world's  history, 
the  possibility  of  precisely  this  new  mode  of 
international  cooperation  which  is  here  out- 
lined is  worthy  of  a  somewhat  careful  study. 

Nations,  viewed  as  corporate  entities,  are 
as  subject  to  risks  as  are  individual  human 

xi 


INTRODUCTION 

beings.  Some  of  these  risks  are  principally 
moral  in  their  nature ;  but  many  of  them  can 
be  more  or  less  exactly  estimated  in  economic 
terms.  Thus,  floods,  famines,  pestilences, 
earthquakes,  and  volcanoes  may  interfere,  in 
various  fashions,  with  the  economic  as  well 
as  with  the  rest  of  the  social  life  of  the  peoples 
thus  afflicted.  Apart  from  actual  famines, 
the  considerable  failure  of  their  crops  may 
impair,  for  a  season,  the  normal  supplies  of 
individual  nations.  Internal  crises,  social  and 
political,  may  interrupt  their  healthy  develop- 
ment in  ways  involving  not  only  moral 
disasters,  but  heavy  expenses.  Such  evils 
come  upon  various  nations  with  irregularly 
recurrent,  but  also  with  widely  different, 
weight  and  seriousness.  Only  a  vast  and 
long-continued  collection  and  an  exceedingly 
difficult  statistical  analysis  of  the  facts  regard- 
ing such  calamities  could  determine  the  regu- 
larities which  a  sufficiently  large  number  of 
instances  of  national  disaster-  would  be,  if 
properly  studied,  certain  to  show.  Such 
regularities,  however,  if  once  discovered, 

xii 


INTRODUCTION 

would  furnish  an  "actuarial  basis"  upon 
which  an  insurance  of  individual  nations 
against  such  risks  could  conceivably  be 
undertaken. 

But  in  order  that  an  insurance  could  be 
actually  undertaken,  there  would  have  to  be 
in  existence  a  vast  and  well-secured  fund, 
contributed  by  a  great  number  of  individual 
nations,  and  held,  under  established  rules, 
ready  to  supply  the  means  of  paying  to  an 
insured  nation  —  perhaps  the  whole  of  its  loss 
in  case  of  any  previously  defined  sort  of  dis- 
aster ;  or  perhaps  such  a  portion  of  that  loss 
as  an  equitably  devised  insurance  contract, 
duly  adjusted  to  the  contribution  previously 
made  by  the  nation  in  question,  declared  to 
be  payable  from  the  common  fund  in  case  a 
certain  definite  disaster  befell  one  of  the 
nations  which  had  subscribed  to  the  insur- 
ance agreement. 

Since  all  irregularly  distributed  phenomena 
of  a  given  type,  if  sufficiently  numerous,  — 
so  long  as  they  are  indeed  finite  in  number, 
—  show  some  kind  of  statistical  regularity, 

xiii 


INTRODUCTION 

this  "actuarial  basis"  for  various  forms  of 
international  insurance  could  be  furnished 
by  the  patient  study  of  the  economically  de- 
finable risks  and  losses  of  a  sufficiently  large 
group  of  nations,  followed  through  a  long 
enough  period  of  time. 

But  an  essay  which,  like  the  present  one, 
proposes  a  new  international  enterprise,  gains 
little  from  a  mention  of  this  purely  the- 
oretical possibility.  The  fortunes  of  nations, 
—  their  risks  and  their  calamities,  in  so  far 
as  such  matters  are  estimable  in  economic 
terms  at  all,  —  might  indeed  be  studied 
historically  and  statistically  (as  if  by  an 
observer  from  another  planet),  in  case  we 
had  any  hope  that  a  group  of  nations  could 
be  induced  to  contribute  to  a  common  fund 
to  be  used  for  the  insurance  of  individual 
nations  against  any  special  sorts  of  disaster. 
And  a  sufficient  study  of  duly  collected  his- 
torical and  statistical  materials  could  indeed 
indicate  to  an  expert  actuary  the  way  in 
which  a  group  of  nations  could  make  pro- 
vision for  compensating  the  individual  mem- 

xiv 


INTRODUCTION 

bers  of  the  group  for  certain  disasters.  But 
the  main  concern  of  this  essay  lies  in  propos- 
ing as  a  topic  for  further  study  and  confer- 
ence the  practical  question  whether  any 
valid  grounds  can  be  given  why  various 
nations  ought  to  be  urged  to  contribute  to 
such  a  common  insurance  fund. 

The  proposal  seems  so  far  away  from  our 
present  habits  of  international  intercourse, 
and  so  unlikely  to  meet  approval,  that  one 
who  glances  at  the  title  of  the  present  essay 
is  likely  to  turn  away  from  it  without  further 
reading.  The  only  hope  of  the  author  lies 
in  the  fact  that  the  topic  of  the  essay  may  be 
approached  from  various  sides,  and  may 
consequently  arouse  the  interest  of  several 
sorts  of  people.  Where  one  possible  reader 
finds  himself  forthwith  repelled,  another  may 
be  induced  to  give  to  the  topic  a  second 
thought  even  because  of  the  very  aspect  of 
the  matter  which  his  neighbor  has  thought 
fantastic,  or  abstruse,  or  unpractical.  The 
business  of  this  word  of  introduction  consists 
simply  in  indicating  how  many  sided  the 

xv 


INTRODUCTION 

topic  is,  and  so  how  many  and  varied  are  the 
chances  that  the  author's  proposals  are 
worthy  of  being  submitted  to  scrutiny  as 
much  when  they  ought  to  be  rejected  as 
when,  by  chance,  some  of  them  are  worthy 
of  approval.  For  the  principal  value  of 
these  proposals  lies  in  the  fact  that  they  have 
a  certain  novelty  (although  they  are  also 
the  outcome  of  a  lengthy  process  of  previous 
reflection) ;  that  they  set  forth  a  method  of 
practical  action  suited  to  the  present  crisis 
(although  they  are  also  founded  on  the  theses 
of  a  student  of  philosophy) ;  that  they  refer 
to  matters  which  the  experience  of  the  busi- 
ness world  has  long  since  tested  (although 
they  also  speak  of  issues  which  the  tragedies 
of  the  present  moment  show  to  be  infinitely 
ideal  and  pathetic) ;  and  finally  that,  while 
they  are  written  down  in  the  midst  of  a  world 
war,  they  expressly  analyze  and  attempt  to 
use  that  motive  which,  in  the  history  of 
humanity,  has  thus  far  most  made  for  peace. 


xvi 


INTRODUCTION 

I 

Now  the  body  of  this  essay  approaches 
our  main  thesis  from  the  side  of  "War."  It 
discusses  in  a  way  which  I  believe  to  be 
somewhat  novel  some  of  the  deepest  motives 
which  render  war  at  present  so  fatally  recur- 
rent and  dangerous.  Hereupon  it  draws  a 
contrast  between  these  essentially  war-pro- 
ducing motives  of  human  life  and  those 
motives  which  are  exemplified  in  certain 
of  the  well-known  and  important  social 
and  commercial  institutions  of  the  world. 
Amongst  those  motives  it  dwells  in  particular 
upon  the  ones  which  are  represented  by  the 
modern  institution  of  insurance.  Hereupon 
it  outlines,  with  necessary  brevity  and  incom- 
pleteness, a  plan  whereby  a  possible  future 
organization  for  mutual  insurance  amongst 
the  nations  may  be  devised  and  may  tend 
towards  the  gradual  establishment  of  more 
pacific  relations  among  the  nations  than 
they  now  possess. 

To  the  plan  thus  submitted  certain  obvious 
objections  arise.  While  leaving  to  the  essay 

xvii 


INTRODUCTION 

itself  its  own  part  in  the  exposition  and 
defense  of  the  plan  for  international  insur- 
ance which  is  set  forth,  this  Introduction 
will  best  serve  its  purpose  if  it  briefly  empha- 
sizes certain  of  these  most  obvious  objections 
to  the  plan  proposed,  and  then  points  out 
why  they  are  not  final,  and  how  they  may 
be  in  a  measure  obviated. 

The  first  of  these  objections  will  occur  to 
every  reader.  If  one  supposes  that  for  any 
reason  a  group  of  nations  were  considering 
whether  to  contribute  to  a  common  fund  for 
the  insurance  of  the  individual  nations 
belonging  to  this  group  against  any  class  of 
evils,  it  would  be  natural  to  say:  "All  inter- 
national peace,  under  existing  conditions,  is 
fragile.  A  fund  contributed  by  individual 
nations  for  their  insurance  against  disasters 
would  constitute  a  possible  object  of  preda- 
tory attacks.  In  other  words,  the  safety  of 
the  insurance  fund  would  have  to  be  pro- 
vided for.  This  would  be  as  difficult  as  to 
provide  for  the  carrying  out  of  any  other 
international  agreement  in  which  large  inter- 

xviii 


INTRODUCTION 

ests  were  involved.  Concerning  the  admin- 
istration of  the  fund  differences  of  opinion 
would  arise.  Since  the  fund  would  be  inter- 
national, these  differences  would  have  to  be 
submitted  to  arbitration  or  else  to  war.  To 
the  already  existing  obstacles  which  the  Hague 
tribunal  has  to  meet  new  obstacles  would  be 
added.  Differences  of  opinion  concerning  the 
use  of  the  insurance  funds  would  frequently 
involve  what  is  usually  called  national  honor. 
They  would,  therefore,  be  hopeless  differ- 
ences. And  this  initial  defect  would  appear 
to  belong  to  any  international  insurance 
scheme." 

It  is  worth  while  in  this  Introduction  to 
call  especial  attention  to  the  fact  that  the 
plan  outlined  in  the  main  body  of  this  essay 
undertakes  to  meet  this  very  objection  by  a 
novel  proposal.  This  proposal  contemplates 
the  founding  of  an  entirely  new  but  very 
easily  comprehensible  kind  of  international 
corporation,  —  a  distinctively  new  entity 
which  would  be  neither  a  nation,  nor  a 
court  of  arbitration,  nor  an  international 

xix 


INTRODUCTION 

congress,  nor  a  federation  of  states,  nor 
any  such  body  as  at  present  exists.  The 
new  body  would  be  a  Board  of  Trustees, 
with  powers  and  duties  which  would  be 
in  the  main  fiduciary  and  with  no  political 
powers  or  obligations  whatever. 

The  new  proposal  depends  upon  a  con- 
sideration which  I  believe  to  be  deeply 
founded  in  human  nature,  and  which  can  be 
best  understood  only  if  the  reader  is  kind 
enough  first  to  become  acquainted  with  what 
this  essay  sets  forth  concerning  those  human 
relations  which  I  call  "dangerous"  and  those 
which,  as  I  believe,  experience  shows  to  be 
essentially  peaceful  in  their  tendencies. 
Common  sense  well  recognizes,  and  all  human 
history,  so  far  as  it  is  applicable  to  the  prob- 
lem at  all,  exemplifies  the  fact,  that  it  is  dif- 
ficult to  find,  for  purposes  of  dealing  with 
delicate  and  controversial  matters,  a  trust- 
worthy politician,  or  a  trustworthy  diplomat, 
or  a  trustworthy  ruler,  or  (in  case  of  matters 
that  involve  sufficiently  pressing  and  passion- 
ate issues),  an  entirely  trustworthy  and 

xx 


INTRODUCTION 

unprejudiced  arbitrator  or  judge.  But  it  is 
much  easier  to  find,  under  suitable  social 
conditions,  a  faithful  and  enlightened  and  fair- 
minded  trustee.  This  essay  contains  many 
illustrations  of  the  reasons  why  this  assertion 
is  true. 

This  essay  proposes  that  a  certain  fund, 
contributed  by  various  nations,  should  be 
put  into  the  hands  of  a  board  of  international 
trustees.  The  constitution  and  the  mode 
of  selection  of  the  members  of  this  board  is 
briefly  set  forth  in  the  text.  The  board, 
according  to  the  scheme  proposed,  would 
have  a  minimum  of  judicial  powers.  These 
judicial  powers  would  never  refer  to  ques- 
tions which  could  be  called  questions  of 
national  honor.  The  judicial  problems  of 
the  'board  would  be  limited  to  questions 
referring  to  the  actual  interpretation  of  cer- 
tain contracts.  These  contracts  would  be 
either  of  the  nature  of  insurance  policies,  or 
else  of  other  forms  of  trust  agreements. 
When  these  contracts  had  put  certain  funds 
into  the  hands  of  the  board,  the  funds  being 

xxi 


INTRODUCTION 

held  in  trust  for  certain  insured  nations,  or 
for  other  nations  that  intrusted  funds  to  the 
board,  the  board  would  have  the  sole  right, 
in  controversial  cases,  simply  to  decide  what 
the  terms  of  the  contract,  or  of  certain  con- 
nected duties  of  trust,  established  as  the  right 
of  the  nation  or  nations  of  whose  funds  the 
board  was  trustee. 

The  tentative  proposal  of  this  essay  is 
that  the  decision  of  the  board  regarding  these 
matters  —  a  decision  which  would  always 
be  made  by  a  public  procedure  and  in  accord- 
ance with  established  rules  —  would  be  a 
final  decision,  so  that  no  nation  should  have 
any  authority,  under  its  agreement,  to  appeal 
from  the  decision  in  question.  Reasons 
appear  in  the  essay  why  such  confidence  in 
trustees  regarding  the  interpretation  of  their 
own  fiduciary  duties  would  be  well  founded, 
if  once  the  international  agreement  under 
which  the  board  was  constituted  had  been 
reasonably  well  devised,  and  if  once  the 
board  had  been  carefully  selected  by  the 
insuring  nations  and  if  the  board  were  suf- 


INTRODUCTION 

ficiently  large  and  varied,  and  if  its  proceed- 
ings were  public. 

The  board  of  international  trustees  in 
question  would  possess,  or  would  gradually 
and  naturally  acquire,  various  fiduciary  duties 
in  addition  to  those  determined  at  any  stage 
by  its  relation  to  the  business  of  international 
insurance.  Insurance  is  in  many  cases 
naturally  combined  with  various  forms  of 
investment,  and  with  various  devices  for 
serving  the  common  ends  of  the  members  of 
a  mutual  insurance  company.  Every  such 
fiduciary  duty  of  the  board  would  be  deter- 
mined by  special  agreements  and  would  be 
administered  according  to  the  rules  and 
decisions  of  the  board.  Inevitably  the  board 
ought  to  have  a  right  to  proceed  against  its 
own  members  by  whatever  judicial  methods 
it  chose,  in  case  an  individual  act  involving 
breach  of  trust  was  in  question.  But  the 
board  as  a  whole  would  not  have  to  report  to 
any  nation.  It  would  act  deliberately  and 
'publicly,  but  in  the  light  of  its  own  conscience 
and  discretion.  This  entire  autonomy  of  the 

xxiii 


INTRODUCTION 

board  with  regard  to  its  duties  and  acts  as 
trustee  would  be  correlated  with  an  entire  ab- 
sence of  any  political  functions  or  powers. 

The  international  board  of  trustees  which 
my  plan  contemplates  would  have  no  police 
to  guard  it,  no  international  army  or  navy 
to  protect  it,  no  direct  interest  in  interna- 
tional controversies,  and  no  reason  for  diplor 
matic  relations  with  any  existing  powers. 
It  would  receive  its  funds  in  trust  as  volun- 
tary contributions  of  the  nations.  It  would 
administer  its  trust  in  accordance  with  poli- 
cies of  insurance  and  deeds  of  trust.  It 
could  neither  declare  war  nor  make  peace. 
Nominally  it  might  hold  its  sessions,  after 
the  manner  of  the  Hague  tribunal,  in  some 
neutral  state,  and  be  regarded  as  possessing 
a  peculiarly  close  although  essentially  ideal 
and,  so  to  speak,  sentimental  connection 
with  that  state.  But  its  obligations  would 
be  to  its  own  conscience,  guided  by  the 
deeds  of  trust  which  it  had  undertaken  to 
administer. 

Its  members  would  be  selected  by  inter- 
xxiv 


INTRODUCTION 

national  agreement.  Its  rules  would  be  sub- 
ject to  change  only  in  such  fashion  as  did 
not  abridge  the  rights  already  acquired  by  the 
nations  who  had  entered  into  the  agreement. 

Just  as  the  individual  holder  of  the  pol- 
icy of  an  insurance  company  has,  if  he  is  dis- 
satisfied with  the  conduct  of  his  company, 
the  freedom  to  surrender  his  policy  and  to 
receive  in  turn  the  "surrender  value"  of 
that  policy,  so,  subject  to  certain  general 
and  reasonable  rules  regarding  due  notice 
and  a  proper  period  of  time  allowed  for  with- 
drawal, any  nation  that  found  itpelf  dissatis- 
fied with  the  procedure  of  the  international 
board  of  trustees  would  be  free  to  withdraw 
its  interest  in  the  entire  enterprise  and  to 
receive  the  "surrender  value"  of  its  policy, 
and  a  return  of  its  funds  held  in  trust. 

I  submit  that  an  international  board  of 
this  kind  would  be  at  present  a  novelty,  and 
that,  if  some  form  of  international  insurance 
proves  to  be  feasible,  such  a  body  might 
become,  in  the  end,  one  of  the  most  potent 
international  enterprises  on  earth. 

xxv 


INTRODUCTION 

But  all  the  foregoing  is  subject  to  the  very 
obvious  objection,  that  if  the  board  had  no 
army,  no  navy,  and  no  political  powers,  it 
would  be  helpless  to  defend  the  funds  com- 
mitted to  its  trust  from  the  assaults  of  any 
power  that  desired  to  use  these  funds  for  its 
own  purposes.  In  fact,  the  powers  of  the 
board  of  trustees  in  question  would  be  indeed 
financial  and  fiduciary  in  case  the  nations 
respected  these  powers.  But  such  powers, 
an  objector  might  insist,  would  be  wholly 
spiritual.  Wherein  would  lie  their  temporal 
safeguard  ? 

To  this  perfectly  obvious  objection  this 
essay  proposes  an  equally  obvious  plan  by 
which  the  funds  committed  to  the  trustees 
could  be  so  invested  that  they  were  actually 
inaccessible  to  any  power  on  earth  which 
was  not  actually  in  a  position  to  conquer 
all  of  the  powers  who  had  entered  into  the 
insurance  agreement  or  who  had  deposited 
funds  with  the  trustees.  The  funds  could 
be  invested  as  widely  in  the  world  as  one 
pleases,  and  could  be  made  subject  to  the 

xxvi 


INTRODUCTION 

order  of  tjie  board  of  trustees  and  of  that 
board  only.  If  an  individual  capitalist,  fear- 
ing that  a  war  of  the  nations  might  endan- 
ger his  private  fortune,  desired  tp  keep  that 
fortune  safe,  he  could,  even  in  the  present 
troubled  world,  guarantee  that  result  with 
reasonable  safety  by  investing  his  funds 
widely  enough,  in  various  countries,  and 
securely  enough  in  each  of  his  selected  deposi- 
tories. The  new  entity  which  this  essay 
proposes  to  institute,  the  international  board 
of  trustees,  would  have  far  more  varied 
opportunities  to  keep  its  funds  in  places 
where  the  armies  and  the  navies  of  i^he 
various  existing  powers  would  threaten  it 
in  vain  despite  the  publicity  of  all  its  official 
proceedings. 

The  board  would  possess  no  territory  which 
could  be  seized,  it  would  lay  claim  to  no 
neutrality  which  could  be  violated.  Its 
absence  of  political  power  would  secure  it 
against  direct  armed  assault.  Its  individual 
trustees  might  be  made  prisoners  or  executed ; 
but  such  efforts  might  well  kill  its  body 

xxvii 


INTRODUCTION 

without  touching   its   essentially    intangible 
soul. 

Since  its  acts  of  investment  would  all  be 
made  according  to  established  rules  and 
under  the  public  charge  of  the  board,  its 
individual  trustees  would  have  no  power  to 
surrender  its  funds,  no  matter  how  much 
they  wished  to  do  so.  Only  the  board, 
acting  in  its  corporate  power  as  trustee, 
would  have  any  power  to  dispose  of  the 
funds  that  were  put  into  its  trust. 

II 

The  next  objection  which  readily  occurs  to 
the  mind,  and  which  the  reader  of  the  plan 
for  international  insurance  herein  expounded 
is  especially  asked  to  notice,  is  founded  upon 
the  fact  that  if  the  nations,  by  large  contribu- 
tions to  the  common  fund,  won  for  them- 
selves large  and  important  rights  through 
their  insurance  agreements,  they  would  win 
hereby  no  safety  against  the  dangers  of  war, 
and  in  particular  of  conquest.  Yet  amongst 
all  the  evils  against  which  nations  could 
xxviii 


INTRODUCTION 

insure,  if  a  scheme  for  mutual  insurance 
proved  to  be  successful,  some  at  least  of  the 
evils  due  to  war  would  surely  be  the  most 
important.  The  objector  might  well  con- 
tinue that,  if  it  were  possible  to  give  to  the 
plan  such  a  development  as  to  enable  the 
international  board  to  insure  an  individual 
nation  against  any  considerable  portion  of 
the  losses  and  expenses  which  war  might 
entail,  the  very  success  of  the  plan,  up  to 
that  point,  would  tend  to  render  individual 
nations  careless,  and  so  more  disposed,  if  pos- 
sible, than  they  otherwise  would  be,  to  engage 
in  war.  For  the  man  whose  house  is  insured 
may  thereby  be  rendered  less  rather  than 
more  careful  with  regard  to  the  risk  of  fire. 
To  both  these  objections  the  plan  out- 
lined in  this  essay  provides  what  may  be 
regarded  as  at  least  a  partial  answer.  This 
answer  must  be  judged  in  the  light  of  the 
few  passages  in  the  essay  which  directly 
deal  with  these  aspects  of  the  question.  I 
call  attention  to  these  passages,  and  expressly 
point  out  that  what  I  propose  involves  a 

xxix 


INTRODUCTION 

tentative  suggestion,  which  is  proposed  for 
the  sake  of  revision. 

What  it  is  worth  while  to  mention  in  this 
Introduction  is  that  this  essay  suggests  an 
extension  to  international  insurance  of  devices 
which  are  already  known  in  the  insurance  of 
individuals.  In  particular,  a  part  of  the 
plan  here  tentatively  set  forth  would  involve 
a  way  in  which  the  life  of  every  one  of  the 
insured  nations  was,  so  to  speak,  insured  by 
the  general  insurance  organization  for  the 
benefit  of  mankind. 

That  is,  the  more  rights  an  individual 
nation  had  acquired  by  virtue  of  previous 
insurance,  the  less  motive  a  conqueror  would 
have  for  finding  this  nation  attractive  prey. 
For  the  insurance  board  of  trustees  might 
undertake,  by  special  agreements,  functions 
which  were  not  only  those  of  insurance  but 
also  those  of  investment,  so  far  as  concerned 
an  individual  nation.  That  is,  an  individual 
nation  might  put  a  portion  of  its  property  in 
trust,  and  under  the  administration  of  the 
board.  One  could  even  now  conceive  that 

xxx 


INTRODUCTION 

some  South  American  republic  might  find 
such  an  investment  of  a  portion  of  its  wealth 
possible  and  useful.  In  the  future  still 
greater  nations  might  be  attracted  into  simi- 
lar undertakings. 

But  if  either  insurance  rights  or  trust 
funds  thus  belonged  to  a  nation  which  hap- 
pened to  suffer  the  accident  of  occupation 
or  of  conquest,  the  conqueror  of  such  a  nation 
would  not,  according  to  this  plan,  be  able  to  find 
so  much  of  the  conquered  nation's  property, 
or  to  use  it.  For  the  plan  defined  in  this 
essay  includes  the  provision,  that,  if  a  nation 
loses  its  life,  then  its  insurance  rights,  and 
of  course  its  funds  deposited  in  any  form 
in  trust  with  the  international  board,  simply 
revert  to  the  common  fund  of  mankind,  and  are 
henceforth  used  and  held  in  trust  by  the  inter- 
national board  for  the  benefit  of  all  the  insuring 
nations. 

Closely  connected  with  this  provision  of 
the  plan  here  outlined,  is  another,  whereby 
whatever  nation  won  in  a  war  would  be  pre- 
vented from  extorting  from  any  vanquished 

xxxi 


INTRODUCTION 

nation,  by  means  of  any  sort  of  treaty,  either 
its  insurance  rights  or  any  other  funds  which 
it  had,  before  the  war,  put  in  trust  with  the 
board.  This  Introduction  may  well  call 
attention  to  these  aspects  of  the  plan 
involved  in  this  essay,  since  in  case  of  the 
success  of  such  a  plan  as  the  one  here  out- 
lined, these  provisions  might  become  valu- 
able allies  to  the  cause  of  peace. 

Finally,  so  far  as  the  present  set  of  objec- 
tions is  concerned,  the  important  provision 
that  any  nation  committing  the  "first  act 
of  war"  with  which  a  given  contest  began, 
would  thereby  vitiate  so  much  of  its  policy 
as  related  to  any  possible  insurance  that  it 
might  possess  against  any  of  the  costs  or 
expenses  of  this  particular  war,  —  this  im- 
portant provision  would  tend  to  introduce 
a  restraining  motive  against  war.  And  many 
other  such  restraining  motives  could  be 
readily  devised  and  added  to  this  first  motive 
by  means  of  insurance  agreements.  How 
far-reaching  such  a  provision  would  prove 
may  be  left  for  the  further  study  of  the 

xxxii 


INTRODUCTION 

reader  of  this  essay  and  for  such  future 
discussions  as  this  essay,  by  good  fortune, 
may  arouse  amongst  students  of  the  ques- 
tions thus  proposed.  It  is  enough  at  this 
point  simply  to  insist  that  there  are  here 
international  questions  which  are  worthy 
of  careful  consideration,  and  which  do  not 
involve  any  of  t^he  difficulties  which  have 
already  played  so  large  a  part  in  the  history 
of  arbitration,  and  of  other  attempts  at  inter- 
national agreements. 

Ill 

A  colleague  of  mine,  and  a  high  authority 
upon  problems  of  insurance,  in  replying  to 
my  request  for  his  criticisms  upon  this  essay, 
has  pointed  out,  as  a  serious  objection  to  any 
plan  for  international  insurance,  that  strong 
nations  would  be  likely  to  prefer  to  insure 
themselves,  while  if  only  the  weak  nations 
joined  in  the  international  agreement,  little 
would  be  accomplished.  The  direct  rejoinder 
to  this  objection  which  is  suggested  in  the 
text  of  the  present  essay,  consists  in  pointing 
xxxiii 


INTRODUCTION 

out,  that  if  there  were  any  evils,  whether  or 
not  evils  of  war,  against  which  international 
insurance  proved  to  be  feasible,  and  if  the 
plan  here  proposed  began,  even  very 
modestly,  to  accomplish  something  in  the 
way  of  bringing  several  nations  together  for 
purposes  of  mutual  insurance,  every  such 
mutual  insurance  would  involve  the  nations 
in  new  forms  of  cooperation,  whose  motives 
would  be  of  the  essentially  peace-making 
kind  analyzed  in  the  text  of  this  essay. 

But  precisely  in  so  far  as  such  motives 
appeared  at  all  as  a  result  of  international 
insurance,  they  would  tend  to  make,  more 
and  more,  national  evils  insurable.  For  if 
the  nations  begin  thus  to  cooperate,  they  will, 
for  the  first  time,  learn  what  that  sort  of  honor  is 
which  is  involved  in  keeping  agreements  such 
as  the  insurance  business  exemplifies.  What 
is  called  national  honor  is  at  present  alto- 
gether too  much  a  matter  of  capricious, 
private,  and  often  merely  personal  judg- 
ment, simply  because  the  nations  are  not  as 
yet  self-conscious  moral  beings. 

xxxiv 


INTRODUCTION 

They  have  not  learned,  as  corporate  enti- 
ties, what  mutual  loyalty  is,  because  they 
have  not  begun  to  come  together  in  those 
communities  whose  type  is  described  in  this 
essay. 

Personal  honor  is  always  the  correlative 
of  some  practical  form  of  loyalty,  and  of  some 
recognition  of  an  obligation,  —  a  recognition 
that  one  acquires  through  actual  business 
of  the  sort  that  does  not  go  on  in  those  dan- 
gerous relations  which  this  essay  somewhat 
elaborately  analyzes. 

If  the  international  body  of  trustees  had 
in  its  charge  any  large  trust  in  which  a  num- 
ber of  nations  were  interested,  these  nations, 
working  through  their  board,  would  become 
clearly  conscious  of  the  sort  of  loyalty  and 
hence  of  the  sort  of  honor  which  is  found 
upon  the  highest  levels  of  the  business  world. 

Thus  a  genuine  and  reasonable  sense  of 
honor  would  begin  automatically  to  enter 
international  relations.  And  the  more  it 
entered,  the  more  chances  there  would  be 
for  mutual  insurance.  This  mutual  insur- 

xxxv 


INTRODUCTION 

ance,  if  it  once  extended  to  any  of  the  evils 
of  war  at  all,  would  tend  in  time  to  extend  to 
more  and  more  of  them.  And  in  this  way 
the  community  of  mankind  would  be  formed, 
and  would  gradually  grow  by  methods  and 
in  accordance  with  principles  which  are  at 
once  ideal  and  businesslike. 

So,  even  if  one  began  with  the  mutual 
insurance  of  a  comparatively  few  nations 
which  were  relatively  weak,  a  new  sort  of 
international  relation  would  begin  to  exist. 
And  the  more  this  relation  existed,  the  more 
new  international  insurance  enterprises  would 
be  possible.  The  whole  very  wonderful  his- 
tory of  insurance  tends  to  show  this,  and  to 
warrant  the  somewhat  enthusiastic  predic- 
tion with  which  this  essay  closes. 

IV 

One  further  remark  remains  for  this  Intro- 
duction to  emphasize.  Important  as  it  seems 
to  the  present  writer  that  some  beginning 
should  be  made  in  inducing  a  group  of  na- 
tions to  contribute  to  a  common  fund  for 
xxx  vi 


INTRODUCTION 

insurance  against  some  of  the  evils  of  war 
(however  few  of  such  risks  may  be  as  yet 
insurable)  —  still  this  essay,  in  dealing  with 
"war  and  insurance,"  certainly  does  not 
intend  to  confine  itself  solely  to  the  possi- 
bility of  insurance  against  the  risks  of  war. 
A  widely  varied  list  of  natural  calamities 
against  which  insurance  is  possible  has  al- 
ready been  presented. 

It  is  noticeable  that  any  international 
insurance,  which  dealt  with  natural  calami- 
ties, would  involve  a  contract  in  which  the 
individual  nation  was  indeed  to  receive  some 
definable  insurance  payment  in  case  of  cer- 
tain disasters ;  but  that,  as  a  fact,  the  indi- 
vidual subjects  would,  in  most  such  in- 
stances, be  obviously,  at  least  in  part, 
the  natural  beneficiaries  who  would  receive 
from  their  government  the  payments  which 
would  first  come  to  the  nation  in  ques- 
tion from  the  international  board  of  insur- 
ance. 

From  the  nature  of  the  case,  the  inter- 
national board  would  have  no  authority 
xxxvii 


INTRODUCTION 

whatever  to  direct  any  sovereign  state  how 
it  was  to  distribute  to  its  subjects  funds 
delivered  by  it  as  proceeds  of  the  payment 
made  to  it  by  the  board,  in  accordance  with 
the  insurance  policy.  No  possible  interna- 
tional controversy  could  arise  regarding  the 
use  which  any  sovereign  state  made  of  any 
of  its  insurance  benefits  when  once  they  were 
received. 

But,  on  the  whole,  any  modern  sovereign 
state  would  be  inevitably  much  influenced 
by  the  prevailing  public  opinion  of  its  own 
people  with  regard  to  the  distribution  of 
its  insurance  funds.  Consequently,  the  exist- 
ence of  insurance  benefits  and,  in  turn,  the 
existence  of  contributions  made  by  the  indi- 
vidual state  to  the  international  insurance 
fund,  would  be  of  great  possible  benefit  to 
any  individual  state,  in  dealing  with  its  most 
pressing  social  problems.  For  whether  a  na- 
tion was  amply  able  to  insure  itself  against  a 
risk  or  not,  an  insurance  policy  would  con- 
stitute a  convenient  means  of  providing,  in 
advance,  by  a  single  financial  device,  for  a 
xxxviii 


INTRODUCTION 

definite  class  of  the  needs  or  the  risks  of  its 
subjects. 

A  single  example  will  suffice  to  indicate 
the  way  in  which  a  system  of  international 
insurance,  once  established,  would  furnish  an 
extremely  simple  mode  —  a  wholly  new  sort 
of  machinery  —  by  means  of  which  an  indi- 
vidual state  might  deal  with  some  of  its  most 
intimate  internal  problems  and  issues. 

The  various  forms  of  workmen's  insur- 
ance are  now  becoming  of  great  importance 
in  the  life  of  individual  states.  Such  prob- 
lems are  dealt  with  by  different  nations  in 
modes  which  vary  and  ought  to  vary  accord- 
ing to  the  special  social  problems  which 
occupy  the  consciousness  of  the  individual 
nations,  and  which  also  vary  with  the  sys- 
tems of  legislation  and  of  government  which 
characterize  different  nationalities. 

Every  effort  to  apply  the  experience  of  one 
sovereign  state  with  regard  to  the  best  form 
of  workmen's  insurance  to  the  life  of  another 
sovereign  state,  has  at  present  to  involve 
new  legislative  or  administrative  decisions, 
xxxix 


INTRODUCTION 

and  constitutional  difficulties  of  the  most 
varied  sort. 

Now  international  insurance,  without  in 
the  least  interfering  with  the  discretion,  with 
the  constitution,  or  with  the  independence 
of  any  nation  concerned,  would  furnish,  if  it 
existed,  a  most  convenient  mode  whereby 
various  nations  could  learn  from  one  an- 
other's experience,  how  to  deal  with  such  a 
problem  as  that  of  workmen's  insurance,  and 
how  to  apply  what  they  learned  through  such 
experience  to  the  special  modes  of  adminis- 
tration and  of  legislation  which  were  suited 
to  the  constitution  of  each  state. 

Thus,  suppose  that  the  international  board 
of  trustees  existed,  and  that  the  individual 
state  was  willing  to  contribute  a  fund  to  the 
general  fund,  thereby  taking  out  a  policy 
which  insured  to  it,  at  suitable  intervals,  a 
payment  adequate  to  cover  the  total  cost  of 
a  given  class  of  accidents  occurring  to  its 
workmen  in  the  various  dangerous  occupa- 
tions. The  form  of  such  a  policy,  its  costs 
and  conditions,  would  depend  entirely  upon 

xl 


INTRODUCTION 

what  proposal  the  international  board  was 
prepared  to  entertain,  and  what  contribu- 
tion to  the  common  insurance  fund  the 
sovereign  state  in  question  was  willing  to 
make.  The  insurance  payments,  when  duly 
made,  would  be  wholly  at  the  disposal  of  the 
state  receiving  them. 

Only,  instead  of  devising  some  elaborate 
legislation  of  its  own,  hampered  perhaps  by 
numerous  constitutional  and  legal  restric- 
tions, determined  by  the  whole  past  history 
of  its  laws  and  customs,  the  insured  sovereign 
state  would  now  have  on  its  hands  simply 
the  problem  of  distributing  the  fund  paid  to 
it  as  the  result  of  its  workmen's  insurance 
policy,  to  the  people  to  whom,  in  its  opinion, 
this  sum  should  be  equitably  distributed. 

In  a  country  such  as  the  United  States, 
where  any  plan  for  workmen's  insurance  of 
any  type  must  at  present  pass  through  the 
slow  ordeal  of  adjusting  itself  to  the  laws  and 
customs  of  each  separate  state  of  the  Union, 
and  where  a  constitutional  amendment,  au- 
thorizing a  general  federal  law  on  the  subject, 

xli 


INTRODUCTION 

would  involve  awkward  and  possibly  danger- 
ous complications,  the  whole  subject  could  be 
much  more  simply  dealt  with  if  the  interna- 
tional board  of  insurance,  after  due  investi- 
gation of  the  facts  about  accidents,  about 
old  age,  or  about  any  other  topic  involving 
matters  of  interest  to  bodies  of  workmen  in 
any  state  of  the  Union,  named,  not  upon 
constitutional  grounds,  and  not  upon  the 
ground  of  any  treaty  with  any  foreign  power, 
a  sum  in  return  for  which  the  international 
insurance  board  would  be  willing  to  pay,  at 
stated  intervals,  into  the  treasury  of  the 
United  States,  a  certain  sum  called  for  by  a 
certain  policy,  in  case  the  United  States 
Congress  simply  appropriated  the  money  to 
pay  for  the  policy  in  question. 

Now  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  United 
States  is  amply  able  to  insure  itself  against 
all  risks  and  expenses  that  are  due  to  disease 
or  to  accident  or  to  old  age,  in  so  far  as  these 
things  affect  its  various  classes  of  laborers. 
It  is  equally  sure  that  manifold  constitutional 
difficulties  and  varieties  of  custom  he  in  the 

xlii 


INTRODUCTION 

way  of  carrying  through  any  scheme  affect- 
ing workmen's  insurance  throughout  the  vari- 
ous states  of  the  American  Union. 

It  would  be,  therefore,  of  advantage  to  the 
United  States  if  an  international  insurance 
board  existed,  and  if  it  had  the  opportunity 
to  pay  for  any  policy  that  might  at  any  time 
seem  good  to  it  affecting  workmen's  insur- 
ance anywhere  within  its  borders.  For  the 
constitutional  difficulties  and  the  varieties 
of  state  legislation  which  stand  in  the  way 
of  carrying  out  any  one  plan  for  workmen's 
insurance  in  the  United  States  would  not 
stand  in  the  way  of  a  plan  for  appropriating 
a  certain  sum  to  be  paid  by  the  authority 
of  Congress  to  the  international  insurance 
board.  Nor  would  such  difficulties  be  nearly 
as  great  when  the  problem  arose  as  to  how 
the  proceeds  received  from  such  a  policy 
were  to  be  distributed  to  individual  workmen 
throughout  the  United  States,  or  to  any  part 
of  it.  The  insurance  policy  would  not  be 
needed  as  a  financial  investment.  But  it 
would  furnish  a  new  and  valuable  machinery 

xliii 


INTRODUCTION 

for  devising  and  carrying  out  possible  social 
reforms. 

This  is  but  a  single  example.  As  soon  as 
one  considers  the  possible  uses  of  an  interna- 
tional insurance  board,  in  case  that,  while  it 
did  its  business  with  the  nations,  their  indi- 
vidual subjects  were  the  natural  beneficiaries 
of  the  insurance  in  question,  one  sees  that, 
without  the  least  interference  with  the  discre- 
tion or  the  independence  of  any  nation,  a  vast 
simplification  of  the  machinery  whereby  each 
nation  might  deal  with  its  own  social  prob- 
lems would  be  furnished. 

While  the  various  nations  took  out  policies 
for  any  such  social  purpose  by  putting  cer- 
tain sums  in  trust  with  the  board,  they  would 
very  naturally  take  counsel  together,  by  com- 
paring their  various  modes  of  social  insur- 
ance, and  of  other  socially  beneficent  pro- 
cesses. Every  word  spoken  in  such  counsel 
would  tend  toward  mutual  understanding  among 
the  nations  and  towards  simplification  of  the 
social  problems  of  each,  or  of  the  ways  in  which 
these  problems  were  to  be  dealt  with.  Yet  at 

xliv 


INTRODUCTION 

no  moment  would  such  conference  in  the 
least  interfere  with  the  honor  of  the  indi- 
vidual nations,  or  involve  new  disputes,  or 
stand  in  the  way  of  any  national  ambi- 
tion. 

It  will  be  clearly  observed  that  the  inter- 
national board  of  insurance  would  have  no 
hostility  to  the  growth  of  international  arbi- 
tration, or  to  the  authority  of  the  Hague  tri- 
bunal. Its  existence  would  imply  no  hin- 
drance to  any  other  influence  that  at  pres- 
ent furthers,  or  that  may  in  future  further,  the 
substitution  of  peace  for  war  in  international 
life. 

Therefore  the  strong  nations  could  use,  and 
could  profitably  use,  international  insurance 
quite  as  much  and  quite  as  hopefully  as 
the  weak.  For  it  would  provide  them  a 
new  machinery  for  the  financial  care  of  re- 
forms. 

The  more  it  was  used,  the  more  it  would  be- 
come useful.  And  the  genuine  community  of 
mankind  would  indeed  be  begun,  not  as  a 
merely  fantastic  hope,  but  as  an  institution 

xlv 


INTRODUCTION 

whereby  part  of  the  world's  daily  business 
was  done. 

It  seems  well  to  close  this  Introduction 
with  the  words  of  a  great  authority  on  the 
theory  of  insurance,  —  words  by  which  the 
present  writer's  thoughts  have  been  con- 
stantly guided  in  the  writing  of  this  essay. 
The  words  are  those  of  Charlton  Thomas 
Lewis,  Ph.D.  They  appear  in  the  article 
on  "Insurance,"  which  the  eleventh  edition 
of  the  "Encyclopaedia  Britannica"  prints  on 
page  658  of  Volume  XIV:  — 

"The  value  of  insurance  as  an  institution 
cannot  be  measured  by  figures.  No  direct 
balance-sheet  of  profit  and  loss  can  exhibit 
its  utility.  The  insurance  contract  produces 
no  wealth.  It  represents  only  expenditure. 
If  a  thousand  men  insure  themselves  against 
any  contingency,  then,  whether  or  not  the 
dreaded  event  occurs  to  any,  they  will  in  the 
aggregate  be  poorer,  as  the  direct  result,,  by 
the  exact  cost  of  the  machinery  for  effect- 
ing it.  The  distribution  of  property  is 
changed,  its  sum  is  not  increased.  But  the 

xlvi 


INTRODUCTION 

results  in  the  social  economy,  the  substitu- 
tion of  reasonable  foresight  and  confidence 
for  apprehension  and  the  sense  of  hazard,  the 
large  elimination  of  chance  from  business 
and  conduct  have  a  supreme  value.  The 
direct  contribution  of  insurance  to  civili- 
zation is  made,  not  in  visible  wealth,  but  in 
the  intangible  and  immeasurable  forces  of 
character  on  which  civilization  itself  is 
founded.  It  is  preeminently  a  modern  insti- 
tution. Some  two  centuries  ago  it  had 
begun  to  influence  centers  of  trade,  but  the 
mass  of  civilized  men  had  no  conception  of  its 
meaning.  Its  general  application  and  popu- 
lar acceptance  began  within  the  first  half  of 
the  19th  century,  and  its  commercial  and 
social  importance  have  multiplied  a  hundred- 
fold within  living  memory.  It  has  done 
more  than  all  gifts  of  impulsive  charity  to 
foster  a  sense  of  human  brotherhood  and  of 
common  interests.  It  has  done  more  than 
all  repressive  legislation  to  destroy  the  gam- 
bling spirit.  It  is  impossible  to  conceive 
of  our  civilization  in  its  full  vigor  and  pro- 

xlvii 


INTRODUCTION 

gressive  power  without  this  principle,  which 
unites  the  fundamental  law  of  practical  econ- 
omy, that  he  best  serves  humanity  who  best 
serves  himself,  with  the  golden  rule  of  reli- 
gion, 'Bear  ye  one  another's  burdens." 


xlviii 


WAR  AND  INSURANCE 


WAR  AND  INSURANCE 

RE  AT  tragedies  are  great  opportunities. 
The  new  griefs  which  to-day  beset  the 
civilized  nations  call  for  new  reflections  and 
for  new  inventions.  Our  past  methods  of 
furthering  the  cause  of  peace  on  earth  have 
disappointed  many  hopes  that,  in  their  day, 
seemed  both  fascinating  and  reasonable.  We 
must  not  expect,  at  any  time  in  the  near 
future,  to  make  an  entire  end  of  war,  but  we 
need  to  understand  better  than  we  now  do  the 
depth,  the  gravity,  and  the  true  nature  of 
the  motives  which  have  thus  far  made  war- 
like tendencies  so  persistent  in  the  life  of 
mankind.  We  also  need  to  discover,  if  we 
can,  methods  not  yet  tried,  whereby  the  wars 
of  the  nations  may  be  gradually  rendered 
less  destructive,  and  less  willful. 

This  essay  is  to  be  devoted  to  both  the 
tasks  thus  indicated.     The  main  part  of  this 
B  1 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

paper  will  give  an  account  of  some  of  the 
familiar,  but  too  little  heeded,  and  too  ill 
defined  reasons  why  wars  are,  despite  our 
civilization,  so  fatally  recurrent  incidents  of 
our  international  life.  This  first  part  of  our 
paper  must  be  somewhat  lengthily  stated ; 
for,  as  the  old  Buddhist  scripture  says : 

"  Long  is  the  night  to  him  who  is  awake ;  long  is  a 
mile  to  him  who  is  tired  ;  long  is  life  to  the  foolish  who 
do  not  know  the  true  law." l 

And  our  poor  human  nature  is  still  on  the 
level  on  which  we  are  often  wakeful  in  the 
night  and  often  have  yet  to  seek  after  the 
knowledge  of  the  true  law  which  may  some 
day  bring  us  nearer  to  the  life  of  peace. 

This  earlier  and  also  lengthier  part  of  our 
paper  will  gradually  lead  us,  however,  to  the 
definition  of  some  principles  bearing  on  a 
fragment  of  the  true  law  both  of  war  and  of 
peace.  And  so  far  this  paper  will  be  a  con- 
tribution to  what  has  been  called,  by  the 
Dutch  Ethnologist  Steinmetz,  the  "Philos- 
ophy of  War."  But,  at  the  very  close  of  our 

1  MAX  MULLER,  "  Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  Vol.  X,  p.  20. 


INTRODUCTION 

discussion,  we  shall  be  led  to  an  application 
of  these  principles  which  I  believe  to  be  in 
certain  respects  new.  We  shall  then,  in  the 
second  and  much  shorter  part  of  our  discus- 
sion, propose  a  method  of  practically  further- 
ing the  gradual  growth  and  reenforcement  of 
the  cause  of  peace  on  earth.  This  method 
has  not  yet  been  tried.  I  believe  that  the 
principles  upon  which  it  is  founded  are,  in 
certain  concrete  instances,  as  familiar  to  the 
modern  civilized  man  as  are  his  most  char- 
acteristic forms  of  prudence,  of  thrift,  and  of 
cooperation.  But  the  application  of  these 
principles  to  the  philosophy  of  war  remains 
still  inadequate ;  and,  at  the  present  moment, 
this  field  for  further  efforts  to  form  plans  that 
look  towards  peace  is  still  open.  This  paper 
will  thus  close  with  a  brief  indication  of  the 
nature  of  one  such  plan. 


3 


THE  UTOPIA  OF  UNIVERSAL  PEACE 

rriO  propose  any  way  for  furthering  the 
cause  of  universal  peace  is  to  arouse  the 
objection  that  all  such  proposals,  if  definite 
in  their  formulation,  and  universal  in  their 
intention,  have  thus  far  always  proved  uto- 
pian.  As  has  often  been  asserted,  man  ap- 
pears in  history  as  essentially  a  fighting  ani- 
mal. When  he  becomes  civilized,  he  changes, 
indeed,  the  fashion  of  his  fighting,  and,  in 
the  course  of  time,  gradually  improves  both 
the  morals  and  the  methods  of  his  warfare. 
Cruelty,  pillage,  and  extermination  become 
less  prominent  amongst  the  aims  which  ab- 
sorb the  warrior's  mind.  Wars  are  waged  for 
purposes  which  become  more  ideal  as  time 
goes  on.  Humanity  of  mood  directs,  in  a 
measure,  the  plans  of  rival  nations.  The 
modern  national  spirit  itself  sometimes  appears 

4 


THE  UTOPIA  OF  UNIVERSAL  PEACE 

to  be  a  sort  of  preparation  for  some  larger 
enthusiasm  which,  as  we  often  hope,  may,  in 
a  far-off  future  age,  make  the  community 
of  mankind  its  main  object  of  fraternal  devo- 
tion, and  the  whole  earth  its  country. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  as  the  nations  grow 
in  power  and  in  self -consciousness,  some  of  the 
disastrous  but  profoundly  human  motives 
which  most  tend  to  make  men  fight  with  their 
neighbors,  not  only  survive  in  the  midst  of 
the  highest  cultivation  which  we  have  yet 
reached,  but  are  even  intensified  by  the 
very  intelligence,  by  the  loyalty,  and  by 
the  resoluteness,  which  lie  at  the  basis  of 
what  our  civilization  most  needs  and  prizes. 
Nobody  can  rightly  consider  the  problem 
of  war  who  regards  the  war  spirit  as  a  mere 
relic  of  barbarism,  or  as  due  solely  to  the  evil 
side  of  our  nature.  The  mystery  of  war  and 
of  its  fascination  can  be  fathomed  only  in  case 
we  first  observe  that  although,  of  old,  wars 
were  often  due  in  a  large  part  to  the  passions 
and  ambitions  of  rulers  and  of  the  ruling 
classes  of  the  warring  peoples,  modern  wars, 

5 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

however  much  princes  may  take  part  in  their 
beginnings,  are,  on  the  whole,  waged  by 
peoples,  and  are  in  part  the  expressions  of 
the  recently  acquired  power  of  an  intelligent 
democracy.  Ancient  wars  were  frequently 
the  result  of  ignorance,  and  of  blind  popular 
passion,  of  superstition,  or  of  the  greed  of 
individuals.  Modern  wars  are  in  many  cases 
deliberately  and  thoughtfully  planned  by 
patriots  who  love  their  country's  honor,  who 
are  clearly  conscious  of  well -formulated  ideals 
which  they  think  righteous,  and  who  fight 
in  the  name  of  the  freedom  of  the  people, 
and  in  the  service  of  what  they  suppose  to  be 
the  highest  human  culture.  World-wide  sym- 
pathies do  not  prevent  warlike  passions  from 
seeming  to  many  who  cultivate  them  not 
only  necessary,  but  morally  indispensable; 
not  only  honorable,  but  holy  ;  not  only  fasci- 
nating, but  rational. 

Let  us  remember  then  that,  whatever  the 
mere  form  of  any  national  government  may 
be,  it  is  at  present  the  democracy  itself,  or 
at  all  events,  the  prevailing  popular  will, 

6 


THE  UTOPIA  OF  UNIVERSAL  PEACE 

however  it  is  expressed,  which,  in  the  more 
warlike  modern  nations,  actually  prepares 
for  war,  which  dreams  of  it  in  advance,  which 
tries  cheerfully  to  bear  the  burdens  of  its 
expenses,  which  glories  in  its  risks  and  in  its 
victories,  and  which  frequently  and  con- 
sciously justifies  it  as  the  highest,  as  the  com- 
pletest,  and  so  as  the  most  ethical  expression  of 
national  loyalty.  Let  us  remember  too  that 
modern  democracy,  or  whatever  else  expresses 
the  will  of  a  people,  does  this  not  because  it 
lacks  a  sympathetic  interest  in  the  concerns 
and  in  the  sentiments  of  the  men  of  other 
nations,  but  because  our  modern  form  of 
human  solidarity  is  such  that  international 
hate  travels  as  far,  as  fast,  and  as  persuasively 
as  does  love.  The  civilized  world  thrills 
with  sympathy  for  the  calamities  of  obscure 
or  of  distant  men ;  but  it  also  thrills  with  a 
common  admiration  for  high  spirit,  and  for 
warlike  enthusiasm.  Sympathy  implies  a  dis- 
position to  imitate,  and  so,  just  because  of 
our  present  degree  of  solidarity,  we  tend  to 
imitate  whatever  is  impressively  vigorous 

7 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

about  the  will  and  the  power  of  interesting 
men  and  nations.  Such  imitation  is,  in  many 
cases,  an  imitation  of  the  war  spirit. 

Only  in  case  we  keep  in  mind  both  the  vast 
masses  of  popular  interest  and  the  very  high 
grade  of  intelligence  which  are  now  devoted, 
in  many  great  nations,  to  the  cultivation  of 
warlike  motives,  and  to  the  preparation  for 
war,  can  we  see  how  far  away  is  the  Utopia 
of  universal  peace. 

As  a  fact,  the  advance  of  civilization  not 
only  brings  with  it  motives  which  tend  to 
check  and  to  control  the  barbarous  aspects  of 
war,  but  also  motives,  some  of  them  new, 
which  tend  to  make  war  appear,  to  many 
individuals  and  nations,  more  ideal,  more 
righteous,  more  significant,  than  ever.  The 
modern  world,  wherein  every  great  human 
experience  of  passion,  of  sorrow,  and  of  love 
arouses  a  warm  response  in  the  most  distant 
parts  of  the  inhabited  earth,  —  this  same 
world  echoes  the  warlike  passions  as  readily 
as  it  does  the  humane  ones,  longs  to  imitate 
the  powerful  peoples  as  well  as  to  relieve 

8 


THE  UTOPIA  OF  UNIVERSAL  PEACE 

the  sufferers  from  an  earthquake,  and  is 
stirred  by  its  far-reaching  rivalries  as  much  as 
by  its  other  expressions  of  solidarity.  Its 
social  problems  are  common  to  all  the  civ- 
ilized lands ;  but  so  too  are  the  dispositions 
to  encourage  and  to  feel  the  contrasts  of 
races,  and  the  rivalries  of  commerce  and  of 
cultivation.  The  democracies  are  vast;  but 
so  too  are  the  conflicting  interests  for  which 
these  democracies  are  ready  to  fight.  Science 
brings  all  men  near  to  each  other ;  but  science 
also  originates  new  industrial  arts,  and  these 
arts  can  be  used  for  war  as  well  as  for  peace. 
Civilization  makes  men  more  thoughtful  about 
both  social  and  moral  issues.  But  such 
thoughtfulness,  if  once  inspired  by  patriotism, 
and  by  international  jealousies,  can  both 
counsel  and  wage  war  deliberately,  and  with  a 
self-righteous  assurance  such  as  our  element- 
ally passionate  or  simply  superstitious  ances- 
tors never  knew. 

So,  of  themselves,  neither  cultivation,  nor 
thoughtfulness,  nor  humane  breadth  of  sym- 
pathies, nor  the  discoveries  of  science,  nor  the 

9 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

aspirations  of  the  democracy,  have  been  able 
to  make  wars  cease  on  the  earth.  Modern 
wars  may,  as  we  now  know,  become  more 
widespread,  more  democratic  in  spirit,  more 
ideally  self-righteous,  than  ever  they  were 
before. 

Whoever  undertakes,  then,  to  plan  any 
method  of  decreasing  the  evils  of  war,  must 
take  account  of  these  facts  and  must  consider 
how  deeply  rooted  in  civilized  man  the  ten- 
dency towards  war  still  remains.  One  may 
well  begin  such  an  enterprise  by  asking 
whether  it  is  not  indeed  altogether  hopeless. 
In  view  of  the  facts  thus  summarily  sketched, 
is  not  this  great  disease  of  mankind,  the  love 
of  war,  beyond  cure,  and  perhaps  beyond  any 
lasting  relief  ? 

And  yet :  The  spectator  who  to-day  wit- 
nesses the  tragedy  entitled  "Man,"  watches 
a  scene  wherein  both  the  events  and  the  char- 
acters arouse,  side  by  side  with  many  old 
emotions  and  reflections,  certain  wholly  new 
movings  of  pity,  of  fear,  and  of  wonder. 
Can  one  remain  a  merely  passive  spectator? 

10 


THE  UTOPIA  OF  UNIVERSAL  PEACE 

Must  one  not  seek,  at  least  in  imagination, 
some  more  active  means  whereby  he  may 
transform  his  pity  into  charity,  his  fear  into 
an  inspiring  hope,  his  wonder  into  some  sort 
of  interpretation  of  the  meaning  of  what  he 
witnesses  ?  In  such  an  effort  lies  the  task  of 
this  essay. 


11 


n 

THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 


facts  just  cited,  the  prominence  of 
warlike  motives  in  modern  men,  the 
stubborn  survival  in  culture  of  the  ten- 
dencies which  express  themselves  in  arma- 
ments, in  the  jealousies  of  nations,  and  in 
actual  wars,  —  all  these  things  call  for  further 
characterization  in  terms  of  a  principle  which 
shall  be  sufficiently  general  in  its  scope,  and 
sufficiently  important  in  its  practical  appli- 
cations, to  serve  as  a  guide  in  our  search  for 
a  way  of  giving  to  humanity  a  measure  of 
relief  from  its  most  dangerous  social  burdens. 
The  higher  religions  have  long  sought  for 
an  expression  of  such  a  principle.  Two  of 
them  in  particular,  namely  Buddhism  and 
Christianity,  have  found  and  used  a  formula 
which  is,  in  fact,  extremely  general  in  its 
statement,  and  very  highly  practical  in  its 

12 


THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 

demands,  as  well  as  in  some  of  its  applications. 
In  its  Christian  expression  this  formula  is  as 
familiar  as  is  its  failure  to  guide  men,  and  lies 
at  the  basis  of  the  counsel  which  Christian 
teachers  of  the  most  various  creeds  daily  give 
to  each  of  the  faithful  regarding  his  relation 
to  his  fellow  man.  Just  because  of  this 
familiarity  of  the  best  known  forms  of  the 
Christian  formula,  we  may  be  aided  to  make 
the  principle  in  question  momentarily  vivid 
in  our  minds,  if  we  here  refer  to  one  of  the 
simplest  and  most  popular  of  the  scriptures 
of  the  original  Southern  Buddhism,  the  work 
from  which  I  have  already  quoted  the  passage 
about  those  who  find  the  night  long.  The 
name  of  this  book  is  the  Dhammapada. 
Let  me  cite  from  this  scripture  a  mere  frag- 
ment of  a  single  text.  At  a  moment  when 
the  world  is  at  war,  this  ancient  Buddhist 
word  may  awaken,  by  the  very  contrast 
between  its  spirit  and  that  of  the  passing 
mood  of  modern  European  patriots,  a  com- 
ment which  will  help  us  to  see  where  our  real 
problem  lies :  — 

13 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

"  *  He  abused  me,  he  beat  me,  he  defeated  me,  he 
robbed  me ' ;  —  in  those  who  do  not  harbor  such 
thoughts  hatred  will  cease. 

"  For  hatred  does  not  cease  by  hatred  at  any  time  : 
hatred  ceases  by  love,  this  is  an  old  rule." * 

Such,  then,  is  the  formulation  of  the  greatest 
of  human  practical  problems  by  the  Dham- 
mapada ;  such  is  the  solution  of  this  problem 
which  that  ancient  Buddhist  scripture  proposed, 
several  hundred  years  before  Christ.  You 
have  but  to  think  of  the  best  known  words 
of  the  parables  and  of  the  Sermon  on  the 
Mount  in  order  to  recall  other  and  now  dis- 
tinctively Christian  forms  of  this  same  rule 
for  ending  wars  and  for  saving  mankind. 
"Little  children,  love  one  another:"  these 
words,  in  another  part  of  the  New  Testament, 
restate  this  view  of  the  escape  from  all  the 
horrors  which  war  entails.  In  an  equally 
simple,  and,  as  I  may  at  once  add,  in  an  equally 
imperfect  shape,  Tolstoi's  version  of  the 
Christian  spirit  not  long  since  filled  with  a 
sad  longing  the  very  European  world  whose 

1  MAX  MCLLER,  "Sacred  Books  of  the  East,"  Vol.  X,  p.  5. 

14 


THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 

destinies  have,  since  then,  been  so  domi- 
nated by  preparation  for  war,  and  by  acts 
of  war. 

Considered  by  itself,  and  apart  from  all 
theological  formulations,  this  lore  which  is 
common  to  Buddhism  and  to  Christianity  may 
be  summed  up  in  the  assertion  that  the  moral 
destiny  of  man  depends  upon  a  certain  pair 
of  relations,  —  the  relation  of  love  towards 
his  neighbor,  —  and  the  relation  of  hate. 
In  so  far  as  man  is  dominated  by  the  hate- 
relation,  this  doctrine  tells  us  that  he  is  lost. 
In  so  far  as  the  love-relation  becomes  his 
guide,  he  is,  according  to  the  same  teaching, 
saved ;  for  then  he  enters  the  realm  of  inner 
as  well  as  of  outer  peace,  and  his  life  wins  its 
only  true  sense,  its  only  possible  fulfillment. 
There  is,  then,  so  this  view  of  life  teaches,  a 
good  relation  of  man  to  his  neighbor;  it  is 
the  relation  of  lover  to  beloved.  There  is 
a  relation  to  his  neighbor  which  is  not  only 
dangerous,  but  deadly  to  man;  and  that  is 
the  relation  of  an  enemy  to  the  neighbor 
whom  he  hates.  The  whole  problem  of  life 

15 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

lies  here.  Let  men  become  lovers,  and  then 
whatever  men's  mere  fortunes  may  be,  all  is 
well.  Let  them  remain  enemies,  and  then 
not  only  wars  are  waged,  but  also  the  shadow 
of  death  is  upon  the  whole  inner  and  outer 
life  of  man.  The  dead  lie  waiting  burial. 
The  mourners  wail  and  cannot  be  comforted. 
Such,  I  say,  is  the  substance  of  that  view  of 
our  problem  which  Christianity  and  Southern 
Buddhism  share  in  common. 

Now  this  doctrine  of  life  is  so  ancient,  and 
is,  in  mere  words,  so  widely  accepted,  that 
just  because  we  are  deadened  by  the  mere 
repetition  of  such  words,  we  have  difficulty 
in  making  very  vivid  to  our  minds  how  far 
this  common  Buddhist  and  Christian  lore 
is  from  telling  us  the  whole  truth  about  the 
way  whereby  the  .winning  of  peace  and  the 
fruitful  union  of  human  souls  is  to  be  sought, 
if  ever  such  peace  and  union  is  to  take  place 
in  the  world  of  daily  life  at  all. 

In  order  to  illustrate  this  contrast  between 
real  life  and  this  ideal  of  life,  let  us  simply 
fancy  that  some  supernatural  stranger,  having 

16 


THE    NEIGHBOR:    LOVE    AND    HATE 

an  angel's  tongue,  and  bearing  a  flag  of  truce, 
appears  to-day  upon  a  battlefield  in  Belgium 
or  in  Servia,  and,  having  first  somehow  mirac- 
ulously caused  the  conflict  to  cease  for  a 
time,  announces  to  all  present,  so  that  they 
hear  him,  the  news  of  how  he  has  in  his  pos- 
session the  formula  for  ending  all  wars,  includ- 
ing the  present  strife  on  this  field.  Let  him 
then  read,  over  the  heaps  of  the  wounded  and 
of  the  dead  as  they  lie  there  the  words  I  have 
just  read  from  the  Dhammapada :  — 

"Hatred  does  not  cease  by  hatred;  hatred  ceases 
by  love ;  this  is  an  old  rule." 

As  soon  as  this  angel  of  peace  has  finished 
his  message  and  has  departed,  the  warriors, 
so  far  as  they  are  not  yet  helpless,  will  of 
course  return  to  the  tasks  wherein  they  find 
their  honor  and  their  duty,  as  well  as  their 
own  fierce  joy  and  pain,  their  own  bitter 
weariness,  and  their  own  passionate  obedience 
and  devotion.  As  they  do  so,  will  they  not 
feel,  along  with  us  the  spectators,  that  the 
words  of  this  angel  visitant,  spoken  during 
c  17 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

the  brief  truce,  are  not  only  impotent,  but 
irrelevant  ? 

In  fact,  these  words  do  not  even  touch, 
by  themselves,  upon  the  real  practical  prob- 
lem of  this  battlefield  and  of  all  battlefields. 

This  problem  obviously  is :  how  shall  the 
hate-relation  come  to  be  forgotten,  and  how 
shall  the  love-relation  come  to  be  the  dominant 
motive  of  a  human  life  such  as  is  ours  ?  When 
not  only  our  worst  motives,  but  also  our 
patriotism,  our  love  of  all  that  we  hold  dearest, 
our  honor,  —  when  all  these  counsel  us,  if  we 
be  men,  to  treat  as  enemies  those  who  are 
the  foes  of  this  honor,  we  see  that  we  are  in 
the  presence  not  only  of  passion,  but  of  fate ; 
and  that  this  passive  form  of  the  law  of  love 
can  successfully  address  its  words  only  to 
those  who,  like  the  Buddhist  monks,  or  like 
the  Christian  saints  of  the  desert,  have  first 
abandoned,  as  Schopenhauer  said,  the  will 
to  live,  have  parted  company  with  whatever 
makes  a  man's  character  vigorously  active 
and  unsparingly  and  constructively  creative; 
have  also  parted  company  with  whatever 

18 


THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 

makes  us  ready  to  be  like  those  angels  who 
excel  in  strength.  Hate,  after  all,  is  but  one 
aspect  of  war.  War's  other  aspect,  what 
one  may  call  its  spiritual  aspect,  is  the  loyalty 
to  which  it  gives  active  employment,  the  fear- 
less faith  in  life  which  it  converts  into  works, 
the  endurance  which  it  transforms  into  crea- 
tive deeds.  In  this  other  aspect  of  war  lies 
its  appeal  to  what  is  best  in  man. 

The  real  problems  of  war  cannot  be  solved, 
then,  merely  in  terms  of  this  contrast  between 
the  love-relation  and  the  hate-relation,  and 
in  terms  of  the  mere  condemnation  of  the 
hate-relation.  For  there  are  human  relations 
which  call  out  our  most  active  loyalty,  our 
most  constructive  devotion,  our  highest 
energy,  and  which  cannot  be  defined  merely 
in  terms  of  the  contrast  between  loving  and 
hating  a  man's  individual  neighbor.  Such 
are  the  human  relations  which  are  exemplified 
when  many  men  are  together  devoted  to 
one  common  although  by  chance  unwarlike 
task,  such  as  the  task  of  an  art,  or  of  a  science, 
or  of  some  church  wherein  there  is  present  a 

19 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

genuine  communion  of  the  faithful.  Such 
tasks  may  indeed  be  called  tasks  of  love,  but 
they  are  not  tasks  of  the  merely  self -forgetting 
and  passive  love  which  the  Dhammapada 
contrasts  with  hate.  They  are  the  tasks  of 
a  sort  of  Pauline  charity  whose  object  is  not 
merely  the  individual  neighbor,  but  a  whole 
community  of  many  men  viewed  as  a  super- 
personal,  and  yet  also  as  somehow  a  personal 
being.  The  one  who  loves  in  this  spirit 
loves  a  spiritual  body  wherein  individual 
men  exist  as  members,  and  wherein  he  also 
is  a  member.  He  seeks  not  his  own,  but  he 
loves,  as  Paul  said,  "Not  after  the  flesh  but 
after  the  spirit."  He  loves  as  Paul  also  said 
that  Christ  loved  the  church.  Therefore  he 
is  above  both  the  hates  and  the  loves  which 
contrast  and  which  contend  on  the  battle- 
field. When  a  company  of  artists  or  of  scien- 
tific men  work  together  upon  the  common 
tasks  of  their  calling,  they  are  not  merely,  as 
"little  children,"  loving  one  another,  nor  yet 
are  they  hating,  each  his  neighbor.  Their 
human  relations  are  those  of  the  loyalty  of 

20 


THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 

individuals  to  the  communities  wherein  the 
true  tasks  of  life  are  found.  The  relation 
which  is  here  present  is  expressed  in  the  devo- 
tion of  the  individual's  life  to  the  spirit  of 
some  community,  wherein  he  lives  and  moves 
and  has  his  being. 

Now  such  human  relations,  namely  those 
which  bind  a  patriot  to  his  country,  a  warrior 
to  his  service,  an  artist  to  the  community 
of  all  who  love  art,  a  scientific  man  to  the 
community  of  all  who  study  nature,  these 
are  indeed,  as  we  have  said,  the  highest 
human  relations.  These  express  the  best  in 
man.  I  have  already  said  that  the  motives 
underlying  these  human  relations  often  lead 
to  the  worst  of  warlike  hatreds.  This  is  as 
sad  a  fact  as  it  is  prominent  in  human  history. 
But  we  have  gained  something  for  the  under- 
standing of  our  problem  if  we  have  first  seen 
that  this  problem  involves  not  merely  the 
contrast  between  love  and  hate,  but  the  con- 
trast between  those  relations  which  an  in- 
dividual man  bears  to  his  individual  neighbor, 
and  the  relation  which  a  patriot  bears  to  his 

21 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

country,  or  the  individually  faithful  saint  to 
the  visible  or  invisible  church  to  which,  as 
he  believes,  all  the  faithful  belong. 

It  is  therefore  not  by  mere  love  of  one's 
neighbor  that  hatred  can  be  made  to  cease. 
And  in  fact  historical  Christianity  has  never 
been  merely  a  religion  of  such  passive  love. 
The  Pauline  charity  involves  a  relation  of 
the  individual  to  the  whole  mystical  body 
of  the  faithful.  This  relation  is  viewed  by 
Paul  as  so  important  that  he  tells  us  how, 
without  this  charity,  without  this  relation 
of  the  believer  to  the  whole  spiritual  body 
of  the  faithful,  no  form  of  the  love  of  an 
individual  man  for  his  neighbor,  no  giving 
of  one's  body  to  be  burned,  would  really 
profit  either  a  man  or  his  neighbor  in  any 
respect.  The  Pauline  charity  involves  a  rela- 
tion whose  type  profoundly  differs  from  the 
type  which  the  author  of  the  Dhammapada 
has  in  mind.  Paul  does  not  say:  "Think  of 
that  neighbor  yonder,  and  love  him  ;  and  then 
the  hate- thoughts  and  the  wars  will  cease." 
Paul  says,  in  substance,  "Be  loyal  to  the 

22 


THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 

spiritual  body  whereof  you  are  a  member. 
Gird  on  the  whole  armor  of  loyalty.     Practice, 
meanwhile,  not  mere  self-sacrifice,  but  posi- 
tive virtues  which,  in  form  at  least,  are  essen- 
tially   although    not    merely    militant.     And 
then  you  will  rise  above  petty  hate  as  much 
as  above  merely  private  and  individual  love. 
/V\OM  will  perhaps  wage  war,  but  not  because 
If  you  are  greedy ;   rather  because  you  love  the 
\    union,  the  community  of  all  the  loyal,  the 
\  spiritual  body  of  those  who  are  one  in  faith 
and  in  service.     Then  you  will  be  a  man  with 
a  country;    and  for  your  country  you  will 
be   ready,   on    occasion,   both    to    fight   and 
to  die. 

If  our  angel  visitor  on  the  battlefield  pro- 
claimed the  words  of  Paul  rather  than  those 
of  the  Dhammapada,  he  would  express  what 
I  believe  to  be  the  really  higher  spirit  of  his- 
torical Christianity.  And  the  warriors,  beforf 
they  returned  to  their  awful  tasks,  would 
that,  while  he  had  not  indeed  justified  tl 
slaughter  of  men  as  anything  that  is  in  its( 
a  good,  he  had  given  them  some  glimpse  of 

23 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

the  reason  why  the  warlike  spirit  has  its 
spiritual  meaning,  as  well  as  its  tragic  horror 
of  great  darkness.  He  would  have  hinted 
that,  if  ever  relief  is  to  come  to  humanity's 
great  woe  of  combat,  it  will  come  not  merely 
through  a  cessation  of  hate  and  a  prevalence 
of  love  for  individual  men,  but  through  the 
growth  of  some  higher  type  of  loyalty,  which 
shall  absorb  the  men  of  the  future  so  that  the 
service  of  the  community  of  all  mankind  will 
at  last  become  their  great  obsession,  while 
this  world-patriotism,  when  it  comes,  will 
remain  still  as  active,  and  on  occasion  as 
militant  and  as  businesslike  in  its  plans  and 
in  its  devotion  as  is  now  the  love  of  warring 
patriots  for  their  mutually  hostile  countries. 

In  facing  the  problem  as  to  how  this  possible 
future  world-patriotism,  how  this  distant  but 
eagerly  desired  result  can  ever  come  to  be, 
I  will  not  say  reached,  but  gradually  ap- 
proached, we  have  gained,  I  believe,  some- 
thing, however  little,  by  seeing  that  we  have 
not  here  chiefly  to  do  with  two  contrasting 
relations  of  pairs  of  individual  men,  namely 

24 


THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 

the  love-relation,  and  the  hate-relation.  Our 
fiction  of  the  angel  visitant  on  the  Belgium 
or  Servian  battlefield  helps  to  remind  us 
wherein  consists  the  contrast  between  his 
advice,  as  we  first  stated  it,  and  the  sort  of 
counsel  which  we  ourselves  in  the  present 
discussion  are  seeking.  He  says,  to  every 
warrior:  "Love  your  neighbor,  even  if  he 
has  thus  far  been  your  enemy.  Since  you 
cannot  love  him  and  also  willfully  kill  him,  you 
have  only  to  follow,  all  of  you  at  once,  my 
word,  and  then  not  only  this,  but  all  battles 
will  automatically  cease.  You  will  all  return 
to  your  homes.  Then  peace  will  come  on 
earth." 

But,  as  we  have  seen,  the  instinctive  senti- 
ment which  the  warriors,  after  their  momen- 
tary truce,  and  even  while  the  thunders  of 
the  captains  and  the  shouting  begin  again, 
will  feel  (whether  they  have  wit  and  patience 
to  articulate  their  reply  or  not),  —  this  senti- 
ment may  well  take  the  form  of  saying: 
"I  am  not  merely  related  to  my  neighbor 
here,  who  seeks  my  life  as  I  seek  his,  and  who 

25 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

is  a  hateful  man  hunter  as  I  also  am.  My 
highest  and  deepest  relations  are  to  my  coun- 
try and  to  its  allies  and  foes,  to  our  common 
service,  to  my  honor,  and  (if  you  will)  to  our 
forefathers  and  to  our  posterity,  yes  to  the 
whole  world  of  man." 

And  so,  for  the  warriors,  and  for  us  who 
now  study  the  philosophy  of  war,  the  genuine 
problem  relates  not  so  much  to  the  contrast 
between  the  love-relation  and  the  hate-rela- 
tion, as  to  the  contrast  between  our  relations 
to  our  individual  neighbors,  and  our  relations 
to  our  honor,  or  to  our  duty,  or  to  our  country, 
or  to  mankind,  or  to  whatever  community 
you  may  choose  to  consider. 

Here,  at  length,  we  enter  the  region  where 
the  issues  of  war  and  of  peace  must  be  faced 
and  thought  out,  if  anywhere  we  are  to  find 
a  reasonable  guide  towards  a  solution.  My 
greatest  question  is  not:  "Do  I  love  my 
neighbor  or  do  I  hate  him?"  but  "Have  I,  or 
have  I  not  the  right,  the  worthy,  the  saving 
relation  to  my  community,  to  my  family,  to 
my  country,  to  mankind?"  If  we  want  to 

26 


THE  NEIGHBOR:  LOVE  AND  HATE 

learn  to  answer  this  question,  we  next  need 
to  consider  some  very  plain  and  familiar,  but 
neglected,  facts  about  the  nature  of  com- 
munities, and  about  the  social  relations  of 
men. 


Ill 


THE   DANGEROUS   SOCIAL  RELATIONS  AND 
COMMUNITIES 

TT^ANT,  in  one  of  his  more  practical  and 
popular  works,  has  used  a  well-known 
expression,  which  has  often  been  cited,  but 
which  has  little  been  heeded.  This  expression 
bears  upon  the  natural  relation  of  the  individ- 
ual man  to  his  individual  neighbor.  Hobbes, 
in  the  seventeenth  century,  had  said:  "By 
nature  every  man  is  at  war  with  his  neighbor. 
Only  some  special  social  device  can  make  him 
behave  as  if  he  were  a  peaceful  creature." 
Rousseau,  in  Kant's  own  time,  had  asserted 
that  by  nature  men  love  to  be  in  harmony 
with  one  another,  so  that  only  the  artificial 
customs  of  society  are  the  source  of  the  mutual 
hatreds  and  rivalries  which  lead  to  war.  Kant, 
in  the  remark  to  which  I  now  refer,  goes  deeper 
than  both  of  these  conflicting  theses.  Kant 

28 


THE   DANGEROUS   SOCIAL   RELATIONS 

says,  in  substance:  "By  nature  man  both 
hates  and  loves  his  neighbor."  And  Kant 
goes  on  to  point  out  that,  in  real  life,  each  of 
these  tendencies,  the  loving  tendency  as  well 
as  the  hating  tendency,  actually  both  nour- 
ishes and  inflames  the  other. 

For  man,  as  a  social  animal,  cannot  do 
without  his  neighbor.  In  solitude  he  pines 
or  starves.  It  is  not  good  for  man  to  be  alone. 
Yet,  if  you  give  man  a  companion,  it  is  equally 
natural  that  the  two  should,  erelong,  quarrel ! 

Their  quarrel  need  not  be  due  to  the  fact 
that  they  are  naturally  malicious.  But^per- 
haps  by  mere  accident,  they  soon  get  in  each 
other's  way.  Then  they  easily  begin  to 
quarrel,  and  their  quarrel  tends  to  inflame  its 
own  motives.  Hence  Kant's  formula  for  the 
natural  relations  of  a  pair  of  human  beings 
is  that  the  natural  man  can  "Neither  suffer 
his  fellow  nor  do  without  him."  Deprive 
a  man  of  his  mate,  and  he  finds  the  world 
intolerably  lonesome.  Give  him  a  com- 
panion, and  the  two  irritate  each  other.  For, 
if  only  by  mere  accident,  they  erelong  become 

29 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

rivals  in  some  quest ;  or  perhaps  they  interrupt 
each  other  in  a  conversation  and  then  each, 
if  sufficiently  eager,  begins  to  say  (out  of  pure 
love  both  for  his  fellow  and  for  the  sound  of 
his  own  voice):  "Do  not  interrupt  me. 
Listen  to  me."  Herewith  begins  a  possible 
quarrel.  Such  a  quarrel,  if  two  nations  were 
concerned,  might  lead  to  war. 

This  last  example  of  social  friction  is  not 
Kant's  example,  but  it  well  illustrates  why  what 
one  may  call  the  dyadic,  the  dual,  the  bilateral 
relations  of  man  and  man,  of  each  man  to  his 
neighbor,  are  relations  fraught  with  social  dan- 
ger. A  pair  of  men  is  what  I  may  call  an 
essentially  dangerous  community. 

A  man  may,  at  any  time,  love  his  neighbor. 
They  may  both  feel  kindly  towards  each  other. 
It  may  be  that  neither  is  malicious,  that 
neither  is,  as  people  say,  a  totally  selfish 
creature.  All  that  is  needed,  however,  to 
make  serious  friction  possible  between  the 
two  men  is  that  each  shall  be  active,  and 
watchful,  and  that  he  shall  have  some  sort 
of  "business  and  desire,  such  as  they  are." 

30 


THE   DANGEROUS   SOCIAL   RELATIONS 

It  is  tolerably  certain  that,  if  this  condition 
is  fulfilled,  the  business  and  desire  of  the  two 
men  shall  be,  in  whatever  way  you  please, 
different,  and  in  some  way  contrasting.  Even 
if  they  love  each  other,  they  will  then  be  dis- 
posed not  to  do  precisely  the  same  thing  at 
the  same  time.  Or  if,  as  in  a  conversation 
between  two  people,  each  of  them  does  desire 
to  say,  at  any  moment,  the  very  same  thing 
which  the  other  desires  to  say,  this  same  act 
will  have  different  relations  to  the  conversation 
according  to  the  intents  which  each  of  them 
has  as  he  speaks  to  the  other. 

Now,  in  any  such  case,  the  perfectly  natural, 
and  in  fact  inevitable  contrast,  between  the 
acts,  or  between  the  results  of  action,  on  the 
part  of  the  two  neighbors  who  love  each  other, 
will  of  itself  tend  to  create  friction. 

A  certain  social  tension  is  therefore  a  per- 
fectly natural  accompaniment  of  any  concrete 
social  relation  between  two  people.  How- 
ever friendly  they  are,  at  the  outset  of  a  social 
task,  to  disagree  in  some  respect  is  the  normal 
result  of  any  social  intercourse  between  two 

31 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

neighbors.  If  two  men  are  neighbors,  each 
of  them  inevitably  tends,  in  some  respect, 
to  get  in  the  other's  way. 

Let  the  two  eager  speakers,  who  long  to 
talk  together,  but  who  automatically  tend 
to  interrupt  each  other,  just  because  each 
loves  to  have  the  other  as  his  listener,  let 
them  serve  as  a  perfectly  elementary  example 
of  a  tendency  which  you  find  assuming  all 
grades  of  importance,  from  the  most  trivial 
to  a  furious  quarrel  which  may  lead  to  a  death 
grip  of  two  fighters,  or  to  a  war  between  two 
nations. 

There  is,  therefore,  a  law  of  the  social 
intercourse  between  the  members  of  a  pair 
of  individual  men,  or  (for  that  matter)  of  the 
social  intercourse  between  the  members  of  a 
pair  of  individual  groups  or  nations  of  men,  — 
a  law  for  which  I  have  long  used  the  name : 
The  law  not  only  of  the  danger,  but  also  of  the 
original  sin,  of  the  dual,  or  dyadic  social  rela- 
tions of  men.  The  law  is  this :  When  two 
men,  or  two  consolidated  groups  of  men,  are 
set  at  some  such  social  task  as  observing  each 

32 


THE   DANGEROUS    SOCIAL   RELATIONS 

other,  or  playing  a  game  together,  or  debating 
a  question,  or  buying  and  selling,  or  borrowing 
and  lending,  or  hunting  for  food,  or  even  when 
they  explicitly  undertake  the  task  of  helping 
each  other,  then,  at  any  one  stage  of  this 
dual  or  bilateral  activity,  one  of  the  two 
will  indeed  be  either  loving  the  other,  or 
else  not  loving  him.  And  when  a  new  and 
interesting  relation  to  a  neighbor  first  comes 
in  sight,  love  is  quite  as  natural  as  is 
antipathy. 

But  as  the  two  individuals  pass  from  one 
stage  to  another  of  the  activity  in  question, 
the  natural  contrast  between  the  two  men  or 
groups  tends  to  lead  to  some  mutual  interrup- 
tion, of  jostling,  or  to  some  other  vexatious 
contrast  of  behavior.  Each  therefore  tends, 
in  some  fashion,  to  surprise  the  other  pain- 
fully, to  snub  his  activities,  and  so  to  get  in 
the  other's  way.  We  naturally  do  such  things 
not  because  we  are  by  nature  either  mainly 
selfish  or  primarily  malicious  or  even  greedy. 
We  do  all  this  merely  because,  if  taken  in 
pairs,  we  are,  in  each  pair,  two  different  and 
D  33 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

contrasting  people  or  groups.  Our  whole 
self-consciousness,  in  fact,  depends  upon  not- 
ing how  different  from  our  neighbors  each  of 
us  is.  But  contrasts  that  strongly  interest 
us  can  easily  become  unpleasant.  There- 
fore mutual  love  and  agreement  between  the 
members  of  a  pair  of  human  beings  is  an  easily 
interrupted  relation.  Our  differences  can 
readily  come  at  any  moment  to  seem  mutual 
challenges.  If  love  between  a  pair  of  friends 
survives  such  endless  trials,  it  does  so  through 
patience,  or  through  the  aid  of  other  rela- 
tions which  are  naturally  more  stable,  or 
because  love  takes  on  the  form  of  true  loyalty. 
But  loyalty,  which  is  the  love  of  a  self  for  an 
united  community,  always  involves  relations 
which  concern  more  than  two  people. 

Taken  by  itself,  the  mutual  love  of  a  mere 
pair  of  people  tends,  like  physical  energy,  to 
run  downhill ;  to  be  baffled  by  personal  con- 
trasts, to  be  thwarted  by  mutual  interruptions, 
to  give  place  to  a  consciousness  of  painful 
differences,  to  be  worn  out  by  time.  As 
Griselda  says  to  her  cruel  lord :  — 

34 


THE   DANGEROUS   SOCIAL  RELATIONS 

"But  sooth  is  said;  algate  I  find  it  true, 
For  in  effect  it  proved  is  on  me, 
Love  is  not  old  as  when  that  it  is  new." 


This  assertion  constitutes  the  first  half  of  the 
law  of  the  original  sin  of  the  dyadic  human 
relations.  Love,  when  it  is  a  merely  dyadic 
relation  between  a  pair  of  lovers,  is  essentially 
unstable  and  inconstant.  For  the  two  tend 
in  the  long  run  to  interrupt,  to  bore,  or  collide 
each  with  the  other. 

The  second  half  of  our  law  is  easily  stated. 
When  mutual  friction  once  arises  between 
a  pair  of  lovers  or  of  rivals  or  of  individuals 
otherwise  interestingly  related,  whether  they 
be  men  or  groups  of  men,  the  friction  tends  to 
increase,  unless  some  other  relation  inter- 
venes, or  unless  more  than  a  pair  of  members 
belong  to  the  community  wherein  mutual 
love  ought  to  be  sustained,  or  mutual  jealousy 
averted. 

"Never  any  more 
While  I  live, 

Need  I  hope  to  see  his  face 
As  before. 

35 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

Once  his  love  grown  chill, 
Mine  may  strive  — 

Bitterly  we  reembrace, 
Single  still." 


So  laments  the  lonely  wife  in  Browning's 
"  Men  and  Women."  The  situation  is  human. 
It  daily  occurs,  and  is  even  commonplace. 
It  illustrates  the  natural  fortune  of  a  pair 
either  of  lovers  or  of  human  beings  otherwise 
related,  who  remain  merely  a  pair.  When, 
through  any  accident,  mutual  antipathy 
chances  to  arise  in  such  a  pair,  then  each  of 
the  members  of  the  now  distracted  community 
of  two  irritates  the  other  to  new  antipathies. 
Thus  in  such  cases  love  grows  old  while  hate 
renews  its  impish  youth. 

The  only  possible  renewal  of  the  youth  of 
such  an  old  love  depends  upon  establishing 
new  and  creative  social  ties  between  the  two 
who  once  loved,  or  else  upon  enlarging  and 
enriching  the  community,  so  that  it  is  no 
longer  merely  a  community  of  two. 

But  at  this  moment  we  are  reminded  of  a 
new  consideration.  As  a  fact,  the  natural 

36 


THE    DANGEROUS   SOCIAL   RELATIONS 

unit  of  human  society,  in  all  its  stages  of  evo- 
lution, is  the  family.  But  the  normal  family 
is  not  a  pair,  but  is  at  the  least  a  triad,  a 
group  of  three  persons :  Father,  Mother, 
Child.  What  one  might  call  the  molecule  of 
the  most  lasting  and  simply  instinctive  human 
social  groups  is,  so  to  speak,  an  union  wherein 
at  least  three  individual  persons,  three  social 
atoms,  or,  in  higher  stages,  three  social  groups, 
participate.  In  such  a  community  love  can 
indeed  readily  assume  its  more  stable  forms, 
and  can  turn  into  a  more  ideal  loyalty.  In 
a  mere  pair  of  persons,  love,  while  frequently 
both  present  and  intense,  is  essentially  un- 
stable; while  hate,  when  once  it  appears, 
tends  to  grow  with  what  it  feeds  on,  namely 
with  the  natural  contrasts  between  individuals, 
and  because  of  their  mutual  interruptions, 
and  by  virtue  of  the  constantly  growing  con- 
sciousness wherewith  each  of  the  two  anti- 
pathetic persons  observes  how  the  other 
regards  him.  But  in  the  family  triad,  the 
winning  and  common  care  for  the  child 
may  charm  away  many  of  the  most  beset- 

37 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

ting    influences    that   tend   to   wreck   home 
unity. 

Let  us  sum  up  the  results  thus  far  reached : 
The  advice  which  the  Dhammapada  gives 
us,  about  love  and  hate,  ignores  an  essential 
fact,  namely,  the  fact  of  the  dangerousness 
of  the  dyadic  human  relations ;  and  forgets 
this  reason  why  antipathy  is  so  readily 
growing  a  weed  in  our  social  relations.  We 
hate  not^merely  because  we  remember  injuries. 
Many  of  our  sources  of  antipathy  seem  to  be, 
in  the  single  case,  much  more  petty  than  is 
a  desire  for  revenge;  but  are  actually  deeper 
in  their  meaning  than  is  such  a  desire.  Very 
often  we  tend  to  hate  simply  because  there 
are  so  many  of  us,  and  because  we  are  so  dif- 
ferent one  from  the  other;  and  so  because, 
when  we  are  taken  in  pairs,  we  thus  appear 
in  each  pair  as  interrupters  and  intruders, 
each  member  of  the  pair  annoying  his  fellow 
even  while  trying  to  express  whatever  love  he 
chances  to  possess  for  the  other,  and  each  em- 
phasizing his  own  hatred  when  he  feels  it,  by 
dwelling  on  these  dual  or  bilateral  contrasts. 

38 


THE   DANGEROUS    SOCIAL  RELATIONS 

Such  is  thus  far  our  result ;  here  then  is  the 
fundamental  principle  of  the  philosophy  of 
war.  The  deepest  reason  why  war  is  so  per- 
sistent is  that  the  nations,,  thus  far  in  history, 
are  related  chiefly  in  pairs,  —  pairs  of  com- 
mercial rivals,  pairs  of  borrowers  and  lenders, 
pairs  of  stronger  and  weaker  nations,  pairs  of 
superiors  and  inferiors,  pairs  of  plunderers  who 
do  not  understand  each  the  other,  —  pairs  of 
plotters,  each  of  whom  suspects  his  opponent. 

And  the  deepest  reason  why  what  is  best 
in  individual  men  does  not  destroy  but  often 
inflames  the  warlike  spirit,  lies  in  the  fact 
that  the  best  in  individual  men  depends  upon 
their  loyalty  to  their  own  groups,  upon  their 
patriotism,  and  also  upon  their  interest  in 
groups  which  are  not  mere  pairs.  In  such 
interests  in  groups  which  are  larger  and  richer 
than  pairs,  consists  men's  very  desire  for  human 
solidarity.  For  human  unions  can  become 
stable  and  fruitful  only  through  the  establish- 
ment of  relations  which  are  very  different  from 
the  dangerous  dyadic  relations  of  lovers,  of 
rivals,  and  of  warriors. 

39 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

The  sound  advice  to  men  is  then  not  com- 
pletely expressed  by  the  word:  "Little 
children,  love  one  another" ;  but  rather  by  the 
Pauline  advice  to  love  some  united  community 
which  has  the  characters  ascribed  by  Paul  to 
the  church.  War  itself  persists  because  the 
nations  still  cultivate  dyadic  relations  too  ex- 
clusively . 

We  have  thus  seen  wherein  lies  the  basis 
of  the  problem  of  war.  War  is  simply  one 
case  whereby  to  illustrate  how  dangerous  the 
dyadic  relations  are  in  the  social  world ; 
and  how  dangerous  a  community  is  one  which 
has  the  form  of  a  pair  either  of  individual  men 
or  individual  nations. 

In  the  social  world  which  consists  of  pairs, 
love  indeed  finds  many  temporary  dwelling 
places;  but  it  also  finds  no  continuing  city, 
and  so  has  to  seek  in  Utopia  for  a  city  out  of 
sight;  while  hate  is  indeed  not  universal, 
and  not  all  powerful,  but  is  grounded  in  the 
natural  diversities  and  in  the  mutual  observa- 
tions of  men,  and  is  therefore  always  ready  to 
be  aroused  in  those  who  had  been,  until  it 

40 


THE  DANGEROUS  SOCIAL  RELATIONS 

appeared,  friends  and  brothers;  while  if  once 
aroused,  hate  tends  to  grow  more  intense  and 
distracting  as  it  observes  its  own  life.  In 
those  communities  which  are  mere  pairs,  time 
is  the  consumer  of  love  but  the  nourisher  of 
hate.  Love  between  the  members  of  a  mere 
pair  tends  to  wax  old  as  does  a  garment; 
while  hate,  when  once  it  comes,  flourishes  in 
a  malicious  youth,  witch-like  and  death- 
dealing. 


41 


IV 

THE  COMMUNITY  OF  INTERPRETATION 

r  I  THE  outlook  for  humanity  would  indeed  be 
dark,  if  our  social  relations  were  limited 
to  mere  pairs  of  individuals  or  of  nations  or 
of  other  groups  of  men,  whether  petty  or 
vast.  But,  as  a  fact,  this  is  not  the  case. 

We  have  already  seen  that  there  is  at  least 
one  human  community  which  has  characters 
and  relations  such  as  no  mere  pair  of  human 
beings  can  possibly  possess.  This  is  the  com- 
munity consisting  of  father,  mother,  and  child. 
This  natural  and  instinctively  originated  com- 
munity is  never  perfect,  and  is  never  entirely 
stable.  And  hate  can  find  a  place  in  it  as 
well  as  love.  But  we  also  know  that  this 
natural  community  possesses,  even  in  the  life 
of  barbarous  and  uncultivated  man,  a  normal 
stability,  and  a  normal  fruitfulness,  as  a  basis 
of  family  peace  and  loyalty,  which  lies  at  the 

42 


COMMUNITY   OF    INTERPRETATION 

root  of  many  very  vast  social  organizations. 
Out  of  an  aggregation  and  perfectly  natural  in- 
terconnection of  such  triadic  family  groups,  or 
of  what  you  may  call  triadic  social  molecules, 
a  patriarchal  social  order  can  be  built  such 
as  several  very  great  and  stable  Oriental 
civilizations  have  richly  illustrated.  Time 
and  fecundity  favor  the  family.  Its  form 
tends  to  abide.  It  favors  a  type  of  love  which 
forms  a  model  for  all  the  loyal. 

It  behooves  us  then  next  to  consider  whether 
there  are  other  groups  of  human  beings, 
other  communities,  perhaps  artificial,  but 
essentially  sound  and  progressive,  which  have 
characters  such  as  the  triadic  union  of  father, 
mother,  and  child  illustrates.  And  here- 
with our  quest  enters  upon  a  new  stage. 
Pairs  are  dangerous  communities.  Are  there 
triadic  communities  which  are  less  dangerous  ? 
Are  there  many  instances  of  such  triads  ? 
Can  we  name  such  ? 

As  a  fact,  all  of  us  depend  for  the  opportu- 
nity to  do  our  daily  business  upon  the  existence, 
upon  the  stability,  and  upon  the  fruitfulness 

43 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

of  such  relatively  peaceful  and  loyal  triadic 
social  groups.  Let  us  name  a  few  of  them; 
for  in  this  field  concrete  examples  are  espe- 
cially instructive.  Let  us  talk  then  no  more 
of  pairs  of  lovers  or  of  rivals.  Let  us  consider 
some  communities  which  are  essentially  groups 
of  three  individuals,  or  of  three  groups  of 
men. 

Suppose  that  somebody,  —  let  us  call  him 
A,  —  desires  to  do  business  with  another  man, 
whom  we  will  call  C.  So  far,  some  relation 
involving  the  pair  consisting  of  A  and  C  is 
sought.  But  perhaps  A  and  C  are  dwellers 
in  different  cities,  or  in  different  countries. 
Perhaps  they  are  not  on  speaking  terms. 
Perhaps  they  speak  different  languages.  Per- 
haps each  is  too  busy  about  his  own  affairs 
to  dream  of  interrupting  the  other.  In  such 
cases  the  dual  relation  whereby  A  might  do 
business  with  C,  cannot  readily  be  established. 
What  shall  A  do  ? 

A  form  of  business  which  daily  grows,  in 
the  modern  world,  more  and  more  important, 
hereupon  suggests  itself  to  our  minds.  Sup- 

44 


COMMUNITY   OF   INTERPRETATION 

pose  that  A  finds  some  third  man,  —  let  us 
call  him  B,  —  who  undertakes  to  represent 
A's  plans  to  C,  to  interpret,  to  explain,  to  urge 
them  in  C's  presence;  to  act,  in  a  word,  as  the 
agent  of  A  in  the  proposed  dealing  with  C. 
Let  the  business  hereupon  be  carried  out 
according  to  this  method.  That  is,  let  A 
find  the  agent  B.  Let  this  agent,  let  B  do 
the  proposed  work. 

Hereupon  there  will  be  formed  a  community 
consisting  essentially  of  three  persons,  A,  B,  C, 
who  occupy  different  places  in  this  community. 
Their  relations  will  be  not  merely  dual  or 
dyadic,  but  treble  or  triadic.  And  each  will 
have,  in  the  resulting  triadic  transaction,  an 
unique  place.  Each  can  be  named  by  this, 
his  special  function  in  this  triadic  community. 

This  community  will  consist  of  what  is 
usually  called  a  principal,  of  an  agent,  and  of 
a  client,  or  other  such  man,  to  whom  the  agent 
represents  the  principal.  The  relations  of  these 
three  persons  are  such  as  need  to  be  expressed 
in  triadic  terms.  This  community  cannot  be 
reduced  to  a  mere  collection  of  pairs.  If  you 

45 


try  to  understand  its  structure,  you  will  find 
that  you  have  to  think  in  terms  and  in  rela- 
tions with  which  the  study  of  mere  pairs  of 
persons  cannot  make  you  familiar. 

And  now,  this  community  is  such  that  its 
relations  have  a  most  instructive  practical 
value.  To  observe  what  this  value  is,  you 
have  first  to  observe  that  this  community 
is  naturally  a  peace-loving  community.  Every 
business  involving  a  stable  type  of  agency 
depends  upon  mutual  respect  and  confidence. 
And  you  then  have  also  to  remember  that  in 
our  modern  world  we  daily  come  to  be  more 
and  more  dependent  upon  finding  and  using 
agents.  New  forms  of  agency,  new  classes  of 
agents,  accompany  every  advance  of  civi- 
lization. And  you  have  still  further  to  re- 
member that  agents  tend  on  the  whole  to  further 
international  as  well  as  personal  peace  and  good 
will. 

The  type  of  community  here  in  question 
needs  in  view  of  its  vast  power,  effectiveness, 
and  fruitfulness,  a  name  of  its  own.  Let  me 
suggest  a  name.  I  need  a  very  general  name, 

46 


COMMUNITY    OF    INTERPRETATION 

for  this  type  of  community  in  question  is  also 
exemplified  by  triads  of  men,  or  groups  of 
men,  whose  relations  you  would  hardly  think 
of  defining  by  means  of  the  term  agent.  Com- 
mon to  all  the  communities  of  this  type  is 
their  tendency  to  further  peace,  good  will, 
and  loyalty,  and  to  have  an  unifying  influence 
both  upon  individuals  and  upon  nations. 

I  venture  to  call  a  community  such  as 
that  consisting  of  principal,  agent,  and  client 
exemplifies,  a  Community  of  Interpretation. 
It  is  a  community  having  a  very  wonder- 
ful adaptation  to  the  most  various  social 
tasks.  It  is  the  best  type  of  community 
that  we  know,  just  because  of  its  general 
tendency,  illustrated  in  widely  various  special 
examples,  towards  stability,  unity,  and  practi- 
cal effectiveness.  Our  most  productive  as 
well  as  our  most  ideal  sorts  of  business  daily 
require  us  either  to  become  members  of  some 
sort  of  community  of  interpretation,  or,  when 
we  are  already  members,  to  act  loyally  in 
accordance  with  the  place  that  we  occupy 
in  such  a  community.  Such  communities 

47 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

are  not  merely  convenient.  They  are  indis- 
pensable to  civilized  life.  They  are  not  merely 
so  frequent  as  to  be  commonplace,  but  they 
are  socially  so  potent  as  to  seem,  in  some  of 
their  exemplifications,  almost  superhuman 
in  the  skill  and  in  the  humane  sort  of  social 
unity  which  they  create  and  sustain.  Having 
begun  with  the  extremely  well-known  instance 
of  the  community  consisting  of  a  principal, 
an  agent,  and  a  man,  sometimes  called  a 
client,  to  whom  the  agent  represents  the 
principal,  we  may  at  once  characterize  in  very 
general  terms  the  mere  form  which  any  com- 
munity of  interpretation  possesses. 

A  community  of  interpretation  consists 
of  three  persons,  or  groups  of  persons,  who 
are  its  members.  We  may  call  these  members 
A,  B,  and  C.  We  may  first  think  of  them 
as  individual  men.  We  shall  find,  however, 
that  in  general,  each  of  the  members  of  a 
community  of  interpretation  not  only  may 
also  be  a  group  of  men ;  but  that  this  indi- 
vidual group  in  such  a  community  may  be 
much  more  numerous  than  is  any  now  exist- 

48 


COMMUNITY   OF   INTERPRETATION 

ing  nation.  Our  present  interest  lies  in  the 
form  of  the  community  of  interpretation,  in 
its  relations  to  the  warlike,  to  the  peaceful, 
and  to  the  loyal  tendencies  and  dispositions 
of  men.  We  wish  to  show  that,  on  the  whole, 
a  community  of  interpretation,  not  only  is, 
in  itself,  a  peaceful  group  of  men,  but  also 
may  be,  and  frequently  is,  a  very  highly 
active  and  strenuous  and  creative  community ; 
and  that  its  life '  essentially  tends  to  enrich 
both  the  power  and  the  unity  of  mankind. 
A  community  of  interpretation  is  a  sort  of 
artificially  created  but  marvelously  fruitful 
family.  Of  social  molecules,  each  of  which 
consists  of  three  atoms,  or  individuals  united 
in  a  community  of  interpretation,  the  most 
potent  and  peaceful  and  reasonable  social 
orders  in  the  modern  world  consist. 

We  also  wish  to  show  that,  if  the  world's 
peace  is  to  be  furthered,  such  progress  must  take 
the  form  of  creating  and  sustaining  certain 
definable  communities  of  interpretation.  We 
shall  be  able  to  show  that  this  our  main  thesis, 
in  this  paper,  is  at  once  a  philosophical  prin- 
E  49 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

ciple,  and  a  perfectly  practical  and  business- 
like proposal,  whose  truth  and  value  the  mar- 
ket place  exemplifies  as  well  as  does  any 
rightly  constituted  theory  of  society.  By 
this  thesis  our  philosophy  of  war  will  be  at  a 
stroke  converted  into  a  philosophy  of  peace, 
and  that  without  our  confining  ourselves  to 
any  merely  Utopian  dreams  or  plans.  We 
shall  show,  not  indeed  how  universal  peace 
is  at  once  to  be  attained,  but  how  the  human 
world  is  now  actually  on  the  way  towards 
a  possible,  even  if  very  distant,  universal 
peace ;  and  we  shall  also  show  that  this  way 
lies  along  the  very  lines  of  progress  which  the 
form  and  the  functions  of  any  community 
of  interpretation  exemplify.1 

A,  B,  and  C,  the  members  of  any  community 
of  interpretation,  work  together  upon  a  task 

1  The  idea,  although  not  the  name  of  the  "Community  of 
Interpretation,"  is  derived  by  me  from  certain  essays  of  the 
late  logician,  Mr.  Charles  Peirce.  The  philosophical  bearing 
of  this  idea,  and  its  relations  to  very  deep  and  far-reaching 
philosophical  issues,  have  been  discussed  in  Vol.  II  of  my 
recent  work  entitled  the  "Problem  of  Christianity"  (New 
York,  1913).  The  present  application  of  Peirce's  theory  of 
interpretation  to  the  philosophy  of  war  and  peace  is,  so  far  as 
I  know,  new. 

50 


COMMUNITY   OF    INTERPRETATION 

which  is  at  once  theoretical  and  practical,  — 
at  once  businesslike  and  ideal,  —  a  task 
which  may  be  as  unemotional  and  imper- 
sonally stern  in  its  requirements  as  is  any 
serious  business  of  men,  but  which  may  also 
require  all  the  passionate  devotion,  and  all 
the  eager  loyalty,  which  any  man  can  give. 
This  task,  in  its  simplest  expression,  is  this. 
A  and  C,  to  use  again  the  phrase  of  Ham- 
let, have  their  own  individual  "business  and 
desire,  such  as  they  are."  The  remaining 
member  of  the  community,  whom  I  now  call 
B,  has,  as  his  peculiar  business  in  this  com- 
munity, the  task  of  addressing  C,  and  of 
explaining  or  interpreting  to  C  what  A's 
desire  or  business  is,  to  the  end  that  C  may 
be  brought  into  some  definite  sort  of  coopera- 
tion with  A. 

This  cooperation,  if  it  occurs  at  all,  will 
bring  A  and  C  into  some  kind  of  social  unity, 
such  as  will  make  them  act  as  if  they  were, 
in  a  certain  respect,  one  man.  To  bring 
about  this  sort  of  solidarity,  and  this  cooper- 
ation of  C  with  A,  is  the  interpreter's  main 

51 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

aim  and  interest,  so  far  as  he  is  indeed 
the  interpreter  of  this  community.  He 
desires,  just  as  any  reasonable  agent  desires, 
not  to  do  A's  will  alone,  nor  C's  will  alone, 
but  at  once  to  create  and  to  make  conscious, 
and  to  carry  out,  their  united  will,  in  so  far  as 
they  both  are  to  become  and  remain  members 
of  that  community  in  which  he  does  the  work  of 
the  interpreter. 

Since  B  has  this  united  will  of  A  and  C 
as  his  aim  and  inspiration,  he  must  be  what 
I  call  loyal.  That  is,  he  must  be  the  willing, 
and,  for  the  purposes  of  this  special  task  of 
interpretation,  the  thoroughgoing  servant 
of  the  cause  of  uniting  the  will  of  C,  to  whom 
he  represents  the  ideas  of  A,  with  the  plans 
of  A,  whom  he  interprets.  B,  the  interpreter, 
is  therefore  the  most  important  member  of 
the  community  in  question.  For  he  both 
defines  and  expresses  its  united  purpose. 
He  brings  C  into  touch  with  A.  He  holds 
them  together.  His  essential  aim  as  inter- 
preter is  that  not  his  own  private  will,  but 
the  will  of  the  whole  community,  should  be 

52 


COMMUNITY   OF   INTERPRETATION 

done,  and  that  A  and  C  should  act  as  one  man, 
while,  in  bringing  A  and  C  together,  he  usually 
discovers  or  in  some  measure  creates  their 
common  will.  Hence  B  is  above  all  the  most 
obviously  and  explicitly  loyal  member  of  the 
community.  On  the  other  hand,  —  "in  his 
will,"  when  he  finds  and  expresses  it,  "is  the 
peace"  both  of  A  and  of  C.  His  success  lies 
in  this  peace.  His  "business  and  desire,"  if 
he  is  indeed  a  successful  interpreter,  create, 
sustain,  and  constantly  increase  their 
harmony.  "To  this  end  he  comes"  into  this 
community.  He  incarnates  and  furthers  and 
enlightens  its  aims,  precisely  in  so  far  as  he 
worthily  fulfills  his  business  as  interpreter. 

In  the  single  case,  as  in  the  market  place 
or  in  the  office,  the  business  or  the  idea  which 
B  interprets  to  C,  and  the  common  will  of 
the  community  of  interpretation  which  B 
discovers,  expresses,  or  carries  out,  may  relate 
to  matters  of  a  commonplace,  or  even  of  a 
sordid  character ;  but  on  the  whole  there  is  no 
ideal  activity  of  man  which  is  too  lofty  to  be 
expressed  or  furthered  through  a  community 

53 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

of  interpretation.  For  all  rational  plans  in- 
volve the  cooperation  of  pairs  of  men,  —  the 
union  and  the  unity  and  harmony  of  the 
wills  of  those  who  are  to  cooperate.  But,  for 
the  very  reasons  heretofore  pointed  out,  such 
union  and  such  unity  cannot  be  stable,  secure, 
and  enlightened,  unless  to  the  pair  of  men  who 
are  to  cooperate  there  is  added  the  third  man 
whose  business  and  desire  it  is  to  bring  and 
to  keep  these  two  in  touch  each  with  the 
other.  Such  a  mediator  is  precisely  an  inter- 
preter of  one  of  the  two  men  to  the  other. 
The  interpreter  has  then  the  function  to 
transform  the  essentially  dangerous  pair  into 
the  consciously  and  consistently  harmonious 
triad. 

Because  the  interpreter  B  at  once  discovers 
or  creates  and  expresses  the  one  meaning  and 
will  of  A  and  C,  I  have  called  him  "The  Spirit 
of  the  Community." 


54 


SPECIAL  COMMUNITIES  OF  INTERPRETATION 

T  ET  me  next  return  from  the  generaliza- 
tion which  the  mention  of  the  ideal 
business  of  an  agent  has  suggested  to  us,  to 
further  special  examples  of  communities  of 
interpretation.  Let  me  call  your  atten- 
tion to  three  such  communities.  They  are 
both  practical  and  ideal  in  their  nature. 
They  are  both  businesslike  and  redeeming 
in  their  influence. 

The  civilized  world  has  long  depended, 
for  some  of  its  most  characteristic  and  precious 
life,  upon  one  of  these  communities. 

The  two  other  communities  are  modern. 
Until  very  recently  the  world  knew  only  the 
most  rudimentary  beginnings  of  them.  But 
they  have  already  transformed,  in  certain 
profoundly  significant  respects,  the  modern 
world.  They  dominate  our  social  order  more 

55 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

and  more;  and  they  will  continue  to  do  so, 
transforming  it  at  a  rate  which  promises  for 
a  long  time  to  increase. 

The   three   communities   of   interpretation 
which  are  now  in  my  mind  are  these :  — 

1.  The  judicial  community. 

2.  The  banker's  community. 

3.  The  community  of  insurance. 

All  of  these  three  communities  are  coordinated 
with  the  agent's  community,  and  cooperate 
with  various  forms  of  the  latter,  so  that  you 
may  say :  Our  present  civilization  depends, 
for  all  its  most  peaceful,  worldly,  and  practical 
activities,  upon  these  four  distinct  sorts  of 
communities  of  interpretation.  If  you  re- 
moved all  four  from  our  social  order,  then 
this  our  human  world,  precisely  upon  its  most 
practical  and  constructive  side,  would  degen- 
erate into  a  vast  aggregate  of  the  dangerous 
communities  which  are  pairs.  The  family 
triads  aforesaid  would  indeed  remain  as  the 
principal  basis  for  the  loyal  life  of  mankind ; 
while  a  few  other  less  visible  and  less  obviously 
practical  types  of  triads  would  characterize 

56 


COMMUNITIES    OF    INTERPRETATION 

so  much  of  our  civilization  as  still  would  be 
left  to  us. 

Let  us  look  a  little  closer  at  the  communities 
of  interpretation  now  before  us.  The  agent's 
community  we  have  already  characterized. 

The  judicial  community  consists  of  a  pair 
of  contending  individuals  or  social  groups, 
while  the  third  member  of  the  group  is  a  judge, 
or  umpire,  or  arbiter,  or  mediator,  whose 
office  consists  in  interpreting  to  a  defendant 
the  will,  the  case,  and  the  legal  or  social 
rights  of  a  complainant  or  plaintiff. 

The  judicial  community  is  the  most  ancient 
and  familiar  of  the  communities  of  inter- 
pretation. Upon  the  dignity  and  authority 
of  judges  and  umpires  the  social  world  de- 
pends for  the  control  and  transformation  of 
certain  well -known  consequences  of  the  original 
sin  of  the  dyadic  relations.  From  social 
conditions,  which,  if  uncontrolled,  directly 
lead  to  elemental  warfare,  the  judicial  com- 
munity actively  leads  the  way  to  other  social 
conditions  which  constitute  peace.  The  peace 
thus  won  is  not  in  general  the  peace  which 

57 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

the  Dhammapada  advises  us  to  seek  by  sub- 
stituting love  for  hate.  But  it  is  the  peace 
which  incites  men  to  new  cooperations  as 
soon  as  the  contention  is  thus  judicially  settled. 
Hence  the  judicial  community  is  indispensable 
to  civilization. 

The  banker's  community  consists  of  a  bor- 
rower, of  a  lender,  and  of  a  third  person  whose 
life  and  interest  it  is,  in  general,  to  make  the 
relation  of  the  borrower  and  the  lender  a  re- 
lation that  is  profitable  to  both  of  them.  This 
third  person  is  that  active  interpreter  of 
credits,  that  expert  as  to  the  safety  of  loans, 
who  is  known  as  a  banker.  The  lender  de- 
posits with  the  banker.  The  banker  ac- 
commodates the  borrower.  Or,  if  the  borrower 
and  the  lender  are  that  very  dangerous  pair 
consisting  of  persons  known  as  a  promoter 
and  an  investor,  the  banker  may  then  appear 
as  a  broker,  whose  business  it  is  to  bring  and 
to  keep  investors  in  profitable  and  fruitful 
touch  with  those  who  undertake  or  promote 
novel  enterprises,  for  which  they  need  capital. 

Apart  from  the  banker  or  broker,  acting  as 
58 


COMMUNITIES    OF    INTERPRETATION 

interpreter,  the  pair  consisting  of  a  borrower 
and  a  lender  is  a  peculiarly  dangerous  pair. 
The  advice  of  the  Dhammapada,  the  "old 
rule"  that  hatred  ceases  by  love,  becomes  not 
merely  ineffective  but  bitterly  and  tragically 
humorous,  when  applied  to  the  natural  re- 
lations which  tend  to  arise  within  this  pair 
consisting  of  borrower  and  lender.  The  an- 
cient and  medieval  social  world  knew  of 
borrowing  and  lending  mainly  as  calamitous 
social  relations,  which  seemed  fatally  to  lead 
to  avarice,  to  fraud,  and  to  the  bondage  of 
those  debtors  whom  want  or  overconfidence 
had  thrown  into  the  hands  of  their  creditors. 

One  of  the  most  dramatic  of  all  social  trans- 
formations has  been  that  which  has  been  due 
to  the  appearance,  in  the  modern  world,  of 
the  banker's  community  of  interpretation. 
Out  of  an  aggregation  of  the  social  molecules 
which  are,  in  one  way  or  another,  banker's 
communities,  the  whole  vast  and  productive 
system  of  modern  credit  has  grown.  The 
result  is  that,  as  a  noted  publicist  some  years 
ago  said  to  me :  "Ours  is  the  age,  and  ours  is 

59 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

the  civilization  of  the  broker."  You  easily 
see  what  this  publicist  meant.  You  all  know 
how,  despite  all  the  unhappy  social  accidents 
that  interrupt  the  workings  of  the  modern 
system,  an4  that  mar  both  its  morals  and  its 
success,  the  modern  credit  system  is,  on  the 
whole,  both  a  result  of  loyalty  and  a  trainer 
of  loyalty. 

For,  necessary  to  the  great  banker's  endur- 
ing success  is  his  steadfast  loyalty  to  his 
function  as  interpreter  and  so  as  the  "spirit 
of  his  community."  Just  as  he  may  other- 
wise fail,  so  he  may  defraud.  But,  on  the 
whole,  banking  has  made  not  only  for  thrift, 
for  cooperation,  for  the  constant  increase  of 
investment,  for  confidence,  and  so  for  the 
unity  of  mankind,  but  it  has  also  made  for 
loyalty;  and  has  in  fact  both  taught  loyalty 
to  the  business  world  and  exemplified  loyalty, 
as  only  the  work  of  a  community  of  inter- 
pretation can  do.  The  banker's  community, 
then,  is  the  social  molecule  of  a  vast  organism, 
whose  life  is,  on  the  whole,  a  life  of  peaceful 
construction,  and  in  that  sense  a  life  of  a  true 

60 


COMMUNITIES   OF   INTERPRETATION 

love  of  mankind.  If  war  ever  ceases,  if  peace 
ever  comes,  the  banker's  community  will 
have  had  an  important  share  in  the  process. 

It  remains  next  to  speak  of  the  community 
of  insurance.  Everybody  knows  in  general 
of  its  vast  and  transforming  influence,  and 
of  its  recently  acquired  social  importance. 
Few  notice  the  reason  why  it  has  become  so 
important  Our  previous  study  of  the  general 
characters  of  the  community  of  interpreta- 
tion can  be  easily  applied  to  the  community 
of  insurance. 

Men  take  risks.  They  are  often  obliged 
to  do  so.  Sometimes  they  take  them  merely 
because  they  love  risks.  But  when  a  man 
takes  a  risk  and  loses,  there  is  in  general  some- 
body else  who  has  to  bear  the  consequences 
of  this  loss.  It  may  be  his  creditor,  his  assign, 
his  heir,  or  his  next  friend,  upon  whom  the 
loss  falls ;  but,  since  nobody  liveth  unto  him- 
self, and  nobody  dieth  unto  himself,  the  man 
who  takes  a  risk  is  seldom  the  only  man  who 
pays  for  the  loss.  Now  let  us  call  the  man  who 
takes  the  risk  A.  Then  let  the  man  who  has 

61 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

to  bear  the  loss  if  A  loses,  but  who  of  course 
might  correspondingly  win  if  A  won,  be  named 
C,  and  let  us  call  him  A's  possible  beneficiary, 
who  of  course  may  be,  if  A  loses,  quite  the 
opposite  of  a  receiver  of  benefits. 

Now  the  relation  of  A  to  C,  the  relation  of 
the  man  who  takes  the  risk,  to  the  man  who 
may  win  if  A  wins,  but  who  will  lose  if  A  loses, 
is  a  dyadic  relation.  Like  the  other  human 
social  relations  of  pairs,  it  is  dangerous.  It 
daily  embitters  the  relations  of  debtors  and 
creditors.  It  daily  makes  some  people  penni- 
less, and  inspires  others  with  hate.  Its  very 
danger  makes  it  morbidly  fascinating  to  those 
who  have  once  learned  to  gamble.  It  fills 
the  social  order  with  fears  and  suspicions. 
It  wrecks  souls.  And  you  cannot  escape 
from  the  poison  of  this  dangerous  relation  by 
merely  loving  the  man  whose  risks  lead  to 
losses  which  you  have  to  bear.  Love  seldom 
cures  any  such  fool  of  his  folly,  and  the  one 
who  loves  him  suffers  the  more  because  of 
the  love. 

Now  the  community  of  insurance  comes  to 
62 


COMMUNITIES    OF    INTERPRETATION 

exist  when  somebody,  let  us  call  him  B,  under- 
takes to  bring  the  man  who  takes  the  risk 
into  a  true  and  active  union  of  interest  with 
his  possible  beneficiary.  The  members  of 
the  community  of  insurance  are  the  ad- 
venturer A,  that  is  the  man  who  takes  the  risk, 
the  beneficiary  C,  and  the  insurer,  who  is  the 
spirit  of  the  community,  and  who  is  commonly 
incarnate  in  some  corporate  community. 

The  insurer  B  estimates  or  interprets  the 
insurable  value  of  the  risk  which  A  takes. 
For  a  consideration  corresponding  to  this 
insurable  value,  B  undertakes  to  make  C  not 
only  A's  possible  beneficiary,  but  A's  actual 
and  reasonably  secure  beneficiary.  That  is, 
B  insures  the  beneficiary  C  against  any  loss 
due  to  the  risk  which  A  takes. 

For  reasons  which  can  only  be  stated  in 
terms  of  the  theory  of  probability  this  result 
can  be  reached  only  in  case  many  risks  are 
estimated,  and  insured  by  the  same  insurer  B. 
Hence  the  insurer's  community  tends,  far 
more  than  even  the  banker's  community,  to 
demand  some  larger  union  of  the  social 

63 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

molecules  whereof  the  single  community  of 
interpretation  consists.  In  consequence  in- 
surance very  largely  takes  the  form  of  mutual 
insurance.  It  brings  men  together  in  vaster 
and  in  more  highly  organized  and  articulated 
groups  than  the  banker's  world  knows.  It 
leads  to  constantly  new  social  expressions. 
It  contributes  to  peace,  to  loyalty,  to  social 
unity,  to  active  charity,  as  no  other  community 
of  interpretation  has  ever  done.  It  tends,  in 
the  long  run,  to  carry  us  beyond  the  era  of 
the  agent  and  of  the  broker  into  the  coming 
social  order  of  the  insurer.  We  cannot  predict 
all  that  it  will  yet  accomplish;  but  we  can 
already  see  that  of  all  the  business  relations 
and  of  all  the  practical  communities  yet  devised, 
the  insurance  relations  and  the  insurance  com- 
munities most  tend  to  bring  peace  on  earth, 
and  to  aid  us  towards  the  community  of  mankind. 


64 


VI 

MUTUAL  INTERNATIONAL  INSURANCE 

TN  the  search  for  influences  that  might 
further  the  cause  of  international  peace, 
well-known  efforts  have  already  been  made  to 
devise  practical  and  international  uses  of  the 
judicial  community,  of  the  banker's  com- 
munity, and  of  the  agent's  community.  Each 
of  these  efforts  has  so  far  proved  both  con- 
ditionally useful  and  frequently  disappoint- 
ing. No  adequate  effort  has  yet  been  made  to 
further  the  cause  of  peace  through  the  deliberate 
application  of  the  form  of  the  insurer's  com- 
munity to  international  business.  Now  this  is 
what  I  propose  as  my  present  contribution  to 
these  dark  problems. 

The  foregoing  study  of  the  triadic  communi- 
ties of  interpretation,  and  of  the  dangerous 
character   of   those   communities   which   are 
pairs,  has  been  needed  to  enable  us  to  show 
F  65 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

why  this  newest  of  the  great  communities  of 
interpretation  has  so  rapidly  acquired  its 
vast  influence  over  the  social  destinies  of  men 
and  why  we  need  to  put  it  to  new  uses. 

Our  whole  discussion  up  to  this  point  has 
prepared  the  way,  therefore,  for  our  final 
thesis,  which  is  this  :  — 

There  is  a  still  untried  method  of  gradually 
leading  towards  international  peace,  and  of 
rendering  wars  progressively  less  destructive 
and  less  willful.  This  is  the  method  to  which 
I  call  your  attention.  It  is  in  general  the  method 
of  undertaking  mutual  international  insurance 
against  some  of  the  common  calamities  to  which 
all  mankind,  or  certain  large  portions  of  man- 
kind, are  subject.  Stated  in  terms  of  our 
theory  of  the  communities  of  interpretation, 
this  method  may  assume  the  form  of  a  maxim, 
or  if  you  like,  of  a  proposed  constitution  or 
international  agreement  upon  which  a  new 
community  of  insurance  may  be  founded,  as 
follows :  — 

Apply  to  international  relations,  gradually 
and  progressively,  that  principle  of  insurance 

66 


MUTUAL    INTERNATIONAL   INSURANCE 

which  has  been  found  so  unexpectedly  fruitful 
and  peaceful  and  powerful  and  unifying  in  the 
life  and  in  the  social  relations  of  individual  men. 

Begin  to  make  visible  the  community  of 
mankind,  not  merely,  as  at  present,  in  the 
form  of  alliances  which  are  ambiguous,  and 
at  times  irritating,  and  of  arbitration  treaties 
which  are  likely  to  be  broken  at  some  passion- 
ate moment  when  they  are  most  needed,  but 
in  the  form  of  a  sufficiently  large  board  of 
financially  expert  trustees,  whose  membership 
is  international,  whose  services  are  duly  com- 
pensated from  the  funds  of  the  trust,  and  whose 
conduct  is  guided  by  plainly  stated  rules 
which  have  the  substantially  unanimous  con- 
sent of  all  the  nations  concerned  in  the  plan 
of  mutual  insurance  which  is  in  question. 
Let  these  rules  be  changeable  only  by  the  sub- 
stantially unanimous  consent  of  the  members 
of  the  already  existing  community  of  insur- 
ance, or  in  such  wise  as  not  to  abridge  rights 
which  the  already  existent  body  of  rules  have 
created. 

Let  the  funds  of  the  mutual  insuranceorgani- 
67 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

zation  in  question  be  put,  in  form,  into  the 
charge  of  some  well-known  and,  so  to  speak, 
essentially  neutral  power,  such  as  Sweden,  or 
Switzerland.  Let  this  fund  be  protected  from 
merely  predatory  assaults  by  the  fact  that 
under  the  rules,  it  would,  from  the  first,  be 
invested  by  the  board  of  international  trustees, 
that  is  by  the  incorporated  insurance  com- 
munity, in  decidedly  various  investments,  and 
in  various  parts  of  the  world,  so  that  it  could 
not  be  found  or  used  by  any  one  power  unless 
this  power  had  first  violently  conquered  all  of 
the  nations  that  had  contributed  to  the  trust, 
and  that  had,  under  the  rules  thereby  acquired, 
a  definite  interest  in  its  distribution. 

Let  rules  be  formulated,  as  such  became 
needful,  to  regulate  the  conditions  under 
which  one  of  the  partners  in  the  plan  of  mutual 
insurance  could  surrender,  with  or  without 
notice,  its  already  acquired  rights  under  the 
insurance  agreement. 

Let  the  international  insurance  community 
in  question  have  no  direct  political  powers  or 
duties  whatever.  Let  it  be  purely  a  financial 

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MUTUAL   INTERNATIONAL    INSURANCE 

and  fiduciary  body,  with  a  minimum  of  in- 
evitable judicial  functions. 

Let  its  fidelity  to  its  trust  and  to  its  rules 
be  guaranteed  simply  by  the  size  of  its  con- 
trolling board,  by  the  personal  character,  the 
experience,  and  the  mode  of  selection  of  the 
members  of  this  board,  and  by  the  entire 
publicity  of  all  its  proceedings  and  official 
acts. 

Let  it  have  no  powers  as  an  arbitrator  in 
case  of  international  disputes,  but  entire 
autonomy,  under  general  rules,  regarding  those 
judicial  decisions  which  it  would  inevitably 
have,  from  time  to  time,  to  render,  when  disputes 
arose  as  to  what  rights  the  individual  members 
of  this  international  union  for  mutual  insurance 
had  acquired  or  forfeited  by  their  own  acts  as 
sovereign  powers. 

Let  it  lay  down  no  arbitrary  rules  for  inter- 
national morality;  let  it  not  undertake  to 
codify  international  law;  let  it  hold  aloof 
from  all  politically  colored  international  dis- 
putes. 

On  the  other  hand,  let  there  be  simply  no 
69 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

appeal  from  its  deliberate  and  judicial  deci- 
sions as  to  the  financial  and  fiduciary  matters 
which  were  left  to  its  decision  and  discretion 
by  the  international  agreement  for  mutual 
insurance. 

Let  any  and  all  the  sovereign  states  of  the 
world,  great  or  small,  at  war  or  not  at  war, 
whether  accused  or  not  of  present  or  past 
barbarism  by  their  neighbors,  be  at  any  time 
at  liberty  under  general  and  financially  pre- 
cise rules,  to  enter  the  international  insurance 
community  as  new  members,  to  contribute 
to  its  fund,  and  to  receive  in  turn  an  amount 
of  insurance  against  a  definite  sort  of  national 
calamities  —  an  amount  which,  as  in  case  of 
ordinary  mutual  insurance  companies,  should 
be  duly  proportioned  to  the  deposit  made.1 

Finally,  so  far  as  this  first  outline  sketch 


1  Let  it  freely  cooperate,  when  it  chose  and  in  so  far  as  its 
functions  permitted,  with  the  plans,  the  influences,  and  the 
undertakings  of  the  Hague  tribunal.  But,  since  its  own 
business  is  thus  financial  and  fiduciary,  let  it  not  itself  be 
subject  to  the  Hague  tribunal  and  let  it  carefully  avoid, 
so  far  as  possible,  the  actual  taking  part  in  arbitration  or 
"judicial  settlement  of  international  disputes." 

70 


MUTUAL    INTERNATIONAL    INSURANCE 

of  our  plan  is  concerned,  let  a  provision  be 
made  for  emergencies  as  follows :  A  nation, 
insured  under  the  agreement,  might  undergo 
revolutions,  or  might  be  conquered  in  war, 
or  might  be  divided  into  several  states,  or 
might  be  lost  in  some  new  federation  of  vari- 
ous states.  This  transformed  sovereign  state 
might  already  have  acquired,  before  its  dis- 
appearance, larger  or  smaller  rights  to  an 
insurance  payment,  under  conditions  which 
might  have  come  to  be  actually  realized.  In 
this  case,  the  trustees  of  the  mutual  international 
insurance  organization  would  have  sole  power 
to  decide  what  state  or  states,  if  any,  had  inherited 
the  insurance  payment  or  payments  due  to  the 
state  which  had  thus  passed  away  from  the  now 
visibly  represented  family  of  nations.  If,  how- 
ever, the  trustees  of  the  fund  decided,  formally 
and  judicially,  and  of  course  after  due  investi- 
gation, and  quite  publicly:  "No  now  exist- 
ing state  has  justly  inherited  the  insurance 
rights  which  belonged  to  the  formerly  existing 
state.  The  dead  state  is  now  unrecognizable 
among  the  living  states"  —  then  the  insurance 

71 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

rights  of  the  dead  state  would  simply  lapse; 
and  its  insured  funds  would  return  to  the 
general  fund,  to  be  used  by  the  remaining 
members  of  the  community  of  mutual  insur- 
ance under  the  general  rules.  Thus  a  motive 
would  be  furnished  whereby  both  internal  revolu- 
tions and  external  conquests  would  be  made  less 
attractive  to  disturbers  of  the  social  or  of  the 
international  peace  of  mankind. 

Furthermore,  if,  at  the  end  of  a  war,  the 
vanquished  power  had  some  right  under  the 
mutual  insurance  agreement  to  certain  funds, 
and  if  the  victor  hereupon  insisted  upon  forc- 
ing the  vanquished  to  surrender,  as  a  spoil 
of  war,  its  rights  under  the  contract  of  mutual 
insurance  or  the  funds  due  to  it  under  these 
rights,  then  a  treaty  thus  to  surrender  the  prop- 
erty rights  or  the  money  due  to  the  vanquished 
under  the  insurance  agreement,  would  auto- 
matically make  void  the  whole  insurance  contract 
which  the  vanquished  had  made.  From  the 
moment  the  vanquished  had  been  forced  to 
surrender  its  funds,  now  due,  or  its  rights 
acquired  under  the  insurance  contract,  from 

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MUTUAL   INTERNATIONAL   INSURANCE 

that  moment  the  insurance  trustees  would 
simply  pay  nothing  of  the  funds  in  question 
either  to  tfie  vanquished  power  or  to  any  other 
single  power.  The  whole  fund  in  question  would 
simply  return  to  the  common  fund,  and  be  used 
for  the  common  benefit  of  all  the  nations  that 
participated. 

So  much  for  a  first  sketch  of  the  proposed 
agreement  of  mutual  insurance.  You  will 
ask:  Against  what  evils  should  this  mutual 
international  insurance  company,  when  once 
organized,  attempt  to  insure  its  clients? 

In  answer,  first,  think  of  the  long  possible 
list  of  evils  from  which  directly  or  indirectly 
all  the  nations  suffer,  and  with  which,  in  the 
first  place,  war  itself  has  perhaps  little,  — 
perhaps  nothing  to  do.  Such  evils  are  widely 
distributed,  have  an  incidence  which  affects 
now  this  people  and  then  that  people,  are 
capable  of  a  careful  statistical  study,  and  are 
therefore  in  principle  insurable.  Individual 
nations  cannot  in  general  insure  their  subjects 
against  them.  A  community  of  nations  could 
insure  an  individual  nation  against  them,  and 

73 


WAR   AND    INSURANCE 

could  pay  over  a  guaranteed  sum  to  the  insured 
and  suffering  nation. 

A  brief  and  inadequate  list  of  such  calami- 
ties is  as  follows  :  — 

1.  Destructive    earthquakes    and    volcanic 
eruptions. 

2.  Certain  of  the  migratory  pestilences,  and 
in  particular,  certain  of  the  tropical  diseases. 

3.  Some  of  the  destructive  storms  of  the 
type  which  follow,  in  general,  known  tracks 
but  strike  special  localities  by  chance  (such 
for  instance  as  the  West  India  hurricanes, 
and  the  China  Sea  typhoons). 

4.  Recurrent     famines     and     great     crop 
failures. 

5.  Marine  disasters.     (For  the  ocean  exacts 
a  statistically  definable  toll  from  the  commerce 
of  the  whole  world.) 

Herewith  varying  a  little  the  type  of  cases, 
we  may  further  mention :  — 

6.  The  destruction  in  war  time  of  the  private 
property  belonging  to  the  subjects  of  unques- 
tionably neutral  states.     (This  is  a  first  men- 
tion of  the  "war  risks"  which  our  insurance 

74 


MUTUAL    INTERNATIONAL    INSURANCE 

company  might  learn,  in  its  gradual  growth, 
more  and  more  to  insure.) 

Now  suppose  a  community  of  mutual 
international  insurance  once  instituted  upon 
such  general  lines.  To  the  foregoing  list 
of  internationally  insurable  losses,  a  great 
number  of  others  can  and  would  soon  be  added. 
What  would  be  the  general  result  ? 

The  mutual  insurance  community  would  be 
sure  to  do  what  other  mutual  companies  have 
done. 

1.  It  would  proceed  carefully  to  investigate 
such  losses  both  from  a  statistical  point  of  view 
and  with  regard  to  their  causes. 

2.  It  would  attempt  to  reduce  the  number  and 
magnitude   of  these   causes.     To   this   end   it 
would  use  all  possible  moral  influences  con- 
sistent with  its  functions  as  a  trustee.     Being 
no  political  state,  and  having  no  protection 
except  the  fact  that  its  funds  were  nearly 
inaccessible  to  any  predatory  power,  it  could 
use  none  indeed  but  moral  influences.     But 
on  the  other  hand,  being  no  Hague  tribunal, 
although  often  cooperating  with  that  tribunal, 

75 


WAR   AND   INSURANCE 

it  would  not  be  likely  to  irritate  its  clients 
by  unwelcome  judicial  decisions  about  already 
bitterly  controversial  matters.  It  would  need 
to  ask  for  no  new  arbitration  treaties.  It 
would  leave  to  the  Hague  tribunal  the  work 
of  formulating  international  law.  Its  own 
function  would  be  the  higher  one  of  cultivating 
international  cooperation  through  mutual  in- 
surance against  common  evils  and  thereby 
teaching  by  example  the  meaning  and  the 
attractiveness  of  the  loyalty  of  each  indi- 
vidual nation  to  the  community  of  all  nations. 
Mutual  insurance  would  make  this  community 
visible. 

3.  But  these,  its  non-controversial  and 
purely  moral  influences,  would  still  be  influ- 
ences whose  source  would  be  the  first  spirit  of  the 
community  of  all  mankind  which  would  ever 
yet  have  won  permanent  and  visible  presence 
on  earth.  In  its  efforts  not  only  to  alleviate 
but  to  prevent  pestilence  and  famine,  the 
board  of  trustees,  representing  all  the  nations 
in  the  community  of  insurance,  would  inspire 
all  the  nations  actually  to  work  together,  at  once 

76 


MUTUAL   INTERNATIONAL   INSURANCE 

in  a  charitable  and  in  a  businesslike  way,  as 
they  have  never  worked  before.  As  the  spirit 
of  this  triadic  community,  the  insurance  organi- 
zation would  both  exemplify  and  teach  loyalty. 
Now  the  nations,  living,  thus  far,  in  dangerous 
pairs,  and  in  groups  of  pairs,  have  never  yet 
had  any  chance  of  acquiring  international 
loyalty. 

We  have  then  a  vast  experience  of  business- 
like activities  behind  us  when  we  assert  that 
this  triadic  community,  once  founded,  would 
ceaselessly  tend  to  increase,  to  discover  new 
powers,  and  to  exercise  new  and  peaceful 
influences. 

But  you  will  ask :  Could  it  go  farther  ? 
Could  it  insure  its  members  against  any  of  the 
evils  of  actual  war?  And  if  it  did  so,  would 
that  still  more  directly  tend  towards  the 
diminishing  of  wars  ? 

I  answer  that,  if  large  enough,  this  com- 
munity of  mutual  international  insurance  could 
insure  its  members  progressively  against  more 
and  more  of  the  evils  and  destructive  calamities 
due  to  war,  by  the  simple  addition  of  one  very 

77 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

important  rule  to  the  rules  so  far  laid  down : 
If  a  nation  had  a  war  with  another,  the  insur- 
ance trustees  would  never  directly  inquire 
as  to  the  moral  justification  of  this  war,  but 
would  ask :  Who  committed  the  first  act  of  war? 
No  nation  would  receive  insurance  compensation 
for  any  expenses  due  to  a  war  in  which  it  com- 
mitted the  first  act  of  war.  This  rule  would, 
in  each  case,  require  judicial  interpretation. 
But  this  again  would  be  no  arbitration  of  a 
Hague  tribunal,  but  purely  a  financier's 
decision  as  to  whether  or  no  an  insurance 
policy  was  at  least  temporarily  or  in  a  single 
case  vitiated  by  an  act  of  a  nature  known 
beforehand.1 

For  the  rest,  in  so  far  as  our  insurance  com- 
pany undertook  to  pay  any  war  expenses,  it 
would  get  a  businesslike  interest  in  averting 
the  causes  of  war  which  would  express  the 
will  of  all  the  insuring  nations,  and  which 
would  possess  a  fecundity,  an  ingenuity,  and 
a  wisdom  of  which  we  shall  know  nothing 
until  we  get  such  a  community  of  interpre- 
tation formed  to  teach  the  nations,  by  the  potent 

78 


MUTUAL    INTERNATIONAL    INSURANCE 

devices  of  mutual  insurance,  the  art  of  loyalty 
to  the  community  of  mankind. 

But  you  will  say,  such  a  community  would 
need  to  begin  with  very  vast  financial  re- 
sources. How  shall  the  nations,  now  absorbed 
in  greed  and  in  rivalries,  the  dangerous  pairs, 
be  induced  to  invest  their  funds  in  so  prodi- 
gious and  humane  an  undertaking  ? 

To  this  question  the  present  moment  fur- 
nishes the  fitting  answer.  Herein  lies  the  very 
core  of  the  present  practical  proposal.  For, 
when  the  present  war  is  ended,  one  side 
will  be  the  victor.  That  side  will  include 
more  than  one  nation.  The  victors  will  jointly 
or  severally  demand  an  indemnity  or  several 
indemnities  from  the  vanquished,  and  might 
raise  some  new  quarrel  over  the  division  of 
the  spoils.  Well,  —  let  the  victors  make  their 
demand  together.  Let  them  demand  one  indem- 
nity from  all  the  vanquished.  When  it  is  paid, 
let  the  victors  at  once  begin  and  actively  establish 
the  first  mutual  international  insurance  com- 
pany against  national  calamities,  including 
wars.  Let  them  devote  this  whole  indemnity 

79 


WAR    AND    INSURANCE 

to  forming  the  initial  fund  of  this  company. 
Let  them  deposit  the  fund  with  the  trustees, 
and  under  the  formal  care  of  Switzerland  or  of 
Sweden.  Then  let  them  draw  up  their  rules, 
and  thenceforth  invite  all  sovereign  states,  great 
or  small,  including  the  vanquished  states,  to 
insure  by  payments  and  enjoy  all  the  advan- 
tages of  the  insurance.  This  act  of  thus  using 
the  war  indemnity  will  be  much  less  wasteful 
than  to  waste  it  in  preparations  for  future  war. 
The  vanquished  will  not  hope  to  make  it  an 
object  of  future  plunder.  It  will  henceforth 
be  the  fund  of  the  community  of  all  mankind. 
And  this  community  of  all  mankind  will  begin 
to  take  on  visible  form,  presence,  and  power  to 
save. 

Lincoln  on  a  famous  occasion  used  a  triadic 
phrase.  He  spoke  of  "government  of  the 
people,  by  the  people,  and  for  the  people." 

My  thesis  is  that  whenever  insurance  of  the 
nations, by  the  nations,  and  for  the  nations  begins, 
it  will  thenceforth  never  vanish  from  the  earth, 
but  will  begin  to  make  visible  to  us  the  holy  city 
of  the  community  of  all  mankind.  To  such  a 

80 


MUTUAL   INTERNATIONAL   INSURANCE 

vision  perhaps  we  have  a  right,  even  while 
the  slain  lie  awaiting  burial.  Let  us  dwell 
upon  this  vision,  at  once  ideal  and  practical. 
Let  us  say  of  this  vision,  of  this  holy  city,  — 
"Even  so,  come  quickly.  For  then,  none  of 
these  dead  will  have  died  wholly  in  vain." 


81 


NOTES 

I.    (See  page  2) 

STEINMETZ'S  "PHILOSOPHY  OF  WAR'* 
Sebald  Rudolf  Steinmetz  is  professor  of  Ethnology 
at  the  University  of  Amsterdam.  His  "Philosophic 
des  Krieges"  was  first  published  in  1907  and  has  much 
influenced  the  train  of  thought  which  was  first  set 
forth  in  the  present  writer's  "Philosophy  of  Loyalty 
(New  York,  1908),  "and  which  has  gradually  led,  through 
a  series  of  intermediate  books,  to  the  present  Address. 
That  this  influence  has  partly  been  due  to  my  own  op- 
position to  certain  of  the  theses  of  Steinmetz  is  obvious. 
But  I  hope  that  Section  II  of  this  Address  clearly  shows 
that  in  certain  respects  I  stand  greatly  indebted  to  Stein- 
metz for  some  of  his  views  regarding  the  war-like  aspects 
of  human  nature. 

II.    (See  page  28) 

KANT'S  DOCTRINE  CONCERNING  "ANTAGONISM"  AS  A 
SOURCE  OF  SOCIAL  DEVELOPMENT 

The  Kantian  views  cited  in  the  text  of  this  Address, 
are  outlined  in  his  essay  of  1784  entitled:  "An  Idea 
of  an  Universal  History  from  a  Cosmo-political  Point 
of  View."  The  "  Fourth  Principle  "  which  Kant  defines 

83 


NOTES 

regarding  "the  means  which  nature  uses  to  bring  hu- 
man powers  to  full  development,"  declares  that  this 
means  is  furnished  especially  by  the  "Antagonism  of 
men  in  society."  Kant  continues,  "I  mean  by  Antag- 
onism the  anti-social  sociability  of  mankind,  that  is,  the 
tendency  of  man  to  enter  social  relations,  accompanied 
as  this  tendency  is  with  a  constant  resistance  which 
perpetually  threatens  the  very  society  thus  formed." 
A  little  further  on  Kant  continues:  "It  is  this  inner 
conflict  which  stirs  all  a  man's  powers  and  forces  him 
to  overcome  his  own  natural  sloth  so  that,  driven  by 
the  love  of  fame,  or  of  power  over  other  men,  or  of 
greed,  he  seeks  to  win  a  rank  among  his  fellow  men, 
whom  he  can  neither  endure  nor  do  without."  "  Thus 
begin  the  first  true  steps  from  crudity  to  cultivation. 
For  cultivation  consists  in  the  social  worth  of  man." 

Somewhat  parallel  considerations  are  urged  by 
Steinmetz  in  his  study  of  the  way  in  which  the  warlike 
spirit  of  early  man  was  the  source  of  all  his  early  virtues, 
including  his  kindliness,  and  his  disposition  to  help  his 
comrades  in  war  and  his  dependents  at  home.  A  little 
later  in  the  passage  just  cited  from  Kant's  essay,  Kant 
says,  that  without  the  distinctly  unamiable  qualities 
involved  in  this  inner  conflict  of  human  nature,  primi- 
tive man  might  have  lived  in  some  arcadian  form  as 
shepherds  live,  or  as  sheep.  But,  as  Kant  adds,  on 
the  basis  of  such  an  amiable  nature  men  would  hardly 
have  reached  a  life  of  higher  value  than  the  life  of  their 
cattle  possesses.  "Let  us  thank  nature,"  says  Kant, 

84 


NOTES 

"that  man  was  quarrelsome  and  vain,  greedy  and  a 
lover  of  power  !  Without  these  qualities  all  man's 
noblest  natural  powers  would  have  remained  forever 
slumbering.  Man  desires  harmony ;  but  nature  knows 
better  what  is  good  for  a  race  such  as  the  human  race 
is.  Nature  demands  conflict.  Man  longs  to  live  in 
comfort  and  pleasure,  but  nature  gives  him  labor  and 
painful  strife,  even  in  order  that  he  may  find  the  means 
of  raising  himself  beyond  these  sorrows."  Kant  closes 
the  passage  with  a  sketch  of  the  way  in  which  these 
unamiable  tendencies  of  men,  leading  to  conflict,  and 
even  thereby  beyond  conflict,  fit  man  for  a  rational 
life  of  peace. 

III.    (Seepages?) 

LOVE  FOR  COMMUNITIES 

The  definition  of  Loyalty  as  a  willing  and  practical 
devotion  of  a  self  to  a  community  has  formed  the 
theme  of  several  of  my  own  recent  philosophical  dis- 
cussions. Without  accepting  Kant's  account  of  strife 
as  the  main  source  of  human  reasonableness,  I  have 
endeavored  to  make  use  of  his  view  that  the  inner 
conflicts  of  the  individual  man  as  well  as  the  dual  con- 
flicts of  man  and  man,  arouse  problems  for  which  the 
solution  is  found  only  when  a  loyalty  takes  the  place 
of  this  natural  turbulence.  The  present  Address  differs 
from  any  of  my  former  efforts  to  define  the  nature  of 
loyalty  through  its  very  explicit  use  of  the  ideas  of 
Charles  Peirce,  with  special  application  to  some  com- 

85 


NOTES 

munities  of  the  social  and  business  world,  and  to  the 
sort  of  devotion  —  at  once  prosaically  businesslike,  and 
capable  of  the  most  exalted  piety  —  which  communi- 
ties of  this  type  especially  exemplify.  The  more  highly 
theoretical  problems  connected  with  the  communities 
of  interpretation  find  their  place  in  the  second  volume 
of  my  recent  book,  "The  Problem  of  Christianity." 


IV. 

EFFORTS  ALREADY  MADE  TO  USE  THE  FOUR 

COMMUNITIES  OF  INTERPRETATION  IN 

INTERNATIONAL  AFFAIRS 

The  oldest  of  the  communities  of  interpretation,  the 
judicial  community,  has  very  naturally  been  the  one 
to  which  recent  advocates  of  "the  substitution  of 
judicial  methods  for  warlike  methods  in  the  settle- 
ment of  international  disputes"  have  most  appealed. 
Here  the  highest  hopes  of  the  so-called  "Pacificists" 
have  centered.  The  Hague  tribunal  undertakes  to 
play  its  part  in  such  a  judicial  community.  It  is  no 
part  of  the  purpose  of  this  Address  to  ignore,  or  in  any 
way  to  slight  the  importance  of  such  judicial  com- 
munities in  international  undertakings.  Arbitration 
has  played  already  a  great  part  in  the  movement 
towards  peace.  It  will  in  future  come  to  play  a  still 
greater  part.  But  I  believe  that  it  needs  auxiliaries. 
It  is  one  main  purpose  of  this  Address  to  insist  upon 
the  fact  that  the  modern  social  and  business  world 

86 


NOTES 

already  possesses  such  auxiliaries  in  the  form  of  the 
other  types  of  communities  of  interpretation. 

The  limitations  of  the  judicial  communities  as  a 
means  of  ending  war  have  been  skillfully  pointed  out 
by  Steinmetz.  Stated  in  my  own  terms,  these  limita- 
tions are  as  follows  :  (1)  International  disputes  often  con- 
cern matters,  which,  at  the  moment,  appear  to  those 
concerned  too  passionate  in  their  interest  to  admit  of 
arbitration.  Even  if  previous  arbitration  treaties  have 
been  made,  the  "dangerous  pair"  which  happens  to 
be  involved  in  a  given  controversy  may  be  too  much 
disturbed  in  its  relations  to  take  for  the  moment  any 
interest  in  its  former  treaties.  (2)  At  such  moments 
the  lover  of  peace  may  be  disposed  to  appeal  to  national 
honor.  But  without  entering  upon  any  of  the  endless 
controversies  as  to  what  individual  modern  nations 
have  behaved  most  honorably,  or,  on  the  other  hand, 
have  broken  most  treaties,  it  is  enough  to  say  that,  in 
the  relations  of  contending  individual  men,  who  happen 
to  be  members  of  the  same  social  order,  the  judicial 
community  appeals  to  the  consciences  of  disputants, 
especially  because  they  are  already  clearly  aware  of 
some  sort  of  loyalty,  which  they  owe  to  then*  own  social 
order,  as  it  is  represented  to  them  by  their  clan,  by 
their  nation,  by  their  gods,  or  by  their  patriotism.  If 
the  contending  individuals  are  nations,  they  at  present 
do  not  form  a  community  to  which  the  most  of  them 
are  consciously  and  practically  loyal.  But  where  no 
conscious  loyalty  exists  to  a  community  to  which  an 

87 


NOTES 

individual  nation  belongs,  it  is  simply  idle  to  talk  of 
"national  honor,"  because  nobody  can  define  "national 
honor"  except  in  terms  which  presuppose  the  recogni- 
tion of  a  definite  loyalty  on  the  part  of  an  individual 
nation  to  a  community  of  nations.  The  present  inter- 
national problem  is  to  form  such  a  community.  The 
judge,  where  individual  men  are  concerned,  is  espe- 
cially able  to  bring  the  contending  parties  loyally 
together,  because  he  has  other  forms  of  loyalty  to  the 
social  order  to  which  he  may  appeal  and  which  he  may 
use  as  aids.  Otherwise  the  litigants  may  simply  decline 
to  acknowledge  his  authority.  If  hereupon  he  appeals 
to  promises  which  they  have  formerly  made,  they  may 
very  naturally  say  that,  unless  the  judge  and  the  dis- 
putants already  possess  a  common  country,  a  common 
social  order,  a  common  devotion  to  recognized  reli- 
gions or  customs,  they,  the  contending  litigants,  see 
nothing  binding  in  their  former  promises.  In  fact, 
as  soon  as  the  judge  has  to  contend  with  one  of  the 
litigants  with  regard  to  the  litigant's  obligation  to  sub- 
mit the  cause  of  contention  to  the  judge,  the  rebellious 
litigant  and  the  judge  become  a  dangerous  pair.  In 
brief,  the  judicial  community  is  very  important  in 
securing  peace  at  the  moment  when  its  general  authority 
is  already  recognized.  It  is  less  capable  than  are  the 
other  communities  of  interpretation  of  advancing  its 
powers,  and  increasing  the  love  which  contentious  and 
passionate  individuals,  or  nations,  may  entertain  for  its 
value  and  for  its  dignity. 

88 


NOTES 

But  if  the  judicial  community  finds  that  at  some 
moment  the  passions  of  the  contending  parties  lead 
them  to  disregard  its  authority,  and  to  fail  to  realize 
that  their  former  agreements  honorably  bind  them  to 
submit  to  its  decision ;  then  the  international  tribunal, 
like  the  judge  who  sees  before  him  a  litigant  in  con- 
tempt of  court,  must  if  possible  appeal  to  force. 
Whence,  however,  can  the  international  court  derive 
its  force  ?  From  an  international  army  ?  But  the 
great  moral  forces  upon  which  armies  depend  for  their 
existence  are  forces  of  the  sort  now  represented  by 
patriotism.  Will  it  be  easy  for  the  international  army 
to  arouse  the  enthusiasm  which  patriots  now  give  to 
such  demands  as  their  country  makes  upon  them  for 
service  ?  In  other  words,  when  the  great  stresses  come, 
the  international  tribunal  has  to  depend  upon  motives 
which  seem,  at  best,  drearily  reasonable  just  at  the  mo- 
ment when  they  most  need  to  seem  ideally  inspiring. 
We  may  look  to  the  future  for  an  alteration  of  this 
situation,  and  for  a  gradual  evolution  of  a  genuine  de- 
votion to  institutions  such  as  those  which  the  Hague 
tribunal  represents.  But  the  community  of  mankind 
has  first  to  be  formed,  to  become  visible,  and  so  to  be- 
come a  factor  in  the  daily  business  of  the  nations. 

Steinmetz  further  insists  that  since  the  nations,  if 
prosperous,  are  constantly  growing,  in  wealth,  in  popu- 
lation, and  in  undertakings,  new  problems  will  con- 
stantly arise.  International  law  cannot  be  settled 
once  for  all.  It  must  adjust  itself  to  constantly  chang- 

89 


NOTES 

ing  matters  of  controversy.  An  international  court 
cannot  undertake  to  do  all  the  work  of  a  legislator. 
But  if  there  are  no  legislative  bodies,  new  controversies 
will  constantly  arise  in  which  the  two  litigants,  if  they 
consent  to  arbitrate  at  all,  will  come  before  the  inter- 
national court  with  some  such  case  as  this :  "We  both 
of  us  want  that  to  which,  under  existing  international 
laws,  neither  of  us  has  any  clearly  definable  right." 
The  comparatively  recent  controversy  between  Japan 
and  Russia  concerning  the  future  of  Korea,  suggests  a 
type  of  controversy  which  is  not  easily  to  be  ruled  out 
of  the  world,  if  various  nations  continue  to  prosper  at 
all.  Under  such  circumstances  the  international  court 
may  follow  either  one  of  two  courses.  It  may  decide 
arbitrarily  in  favor  of  one  of  the  litigants  as  against 
the  other.  It  may  rule  that  they  are  both  of  them 
wrong  and  that  they  are  required  to  compromise  the 
question.  But  then  it  may  be  precisely  the  wise  com- 
promise upon  which  nobody  can  agree  with  his  neigh- 
bor. At  this  point  we  do  not  say  that  arbitration  must 
necessarily  fail.  We  can  say,  however,  that  we  should 
like  to  find  and  use  some  other  sort  of  community  of 
interpretation  as  an  auxiliary  to  the  work  of  the  tri- 
bunal. 

The  banker's  community  has  been  proposed  as  an 
aid  by  a  number  of  recent  students  of  the  problem  of 
peace.  In  the  long  run,  as  many  argue,  war  will 
cease,  because  a  limit  will  come  to  the  willingness  of 
the  banker  to  advance  the  necessary  expenses.  Thus 

90 


NOTES 

bankers  will  be  the  peacemakers  of  the  future.  The 
questions  here  involved  are  enormously  complex.  If 
a  limit  exists,  and  a  permanent  limit,  not  merely  a  tem- 
porary hindrance,  to  the  power  of  bankers  to  advance 
money  for  warlike  purposes,  such  a  limit  does  not  very 
clearly  appear  visible  to  the  unaided  eye.  Not  merely 
the  interest  but  the  duty  of  the  banker  tends  to  make 
him  willing,  in  the  long  run,  to  advance  money  to  a 
nation  for  purposes  which  he  himself  views  as  legitimate, 
in  case,  acting  as  the  interpreter  of  his  banking  com- 
munity, he  believes  that  the  loan  can  be  disposed  of 
in  the  open  market.  Therefore,  so  long  as  the  patriot- 
ism and  the  prosperity  of  a  nation  enable  it  and  perhaps 
inspire  it  to  pay  the  interest  on  new  bonds,  the  banker 
will  not  permanently  interfere  with  the  power  of  this 
nation  to  express  its  will  through  warfare.  The 
bankers'  community  is  itself  a  useful  auxiliary  to  peace, 
but  it  certainly  needs  such  a  supplement  as  shall  render 
the  community  of  mankind  not  only  visible,  but  a 
community  doing  a  daily  and  interesting,  a  reasonably 
united  form  of  business,  and  of  business  which  involves 
at  any  moment  a  far-reaching  cooperation  among  the 
nations. 

Hereupon,  one  may  very  naturally  think  of  the 
numerous  different  forms  of  the  agent's  community. 
As  a  fact,  the  agent's  community  is  a  powerful  factor 
in  the  promotion  of  the  motives  that  lead  towards 
peace.  It  will  constantly  become  more  powerful. 
Commerce  aids  mutual  understanding  in  ways  which 

91 


NOTES 

began  to  be  potent  at  the  very  outset  of  civilization, 
and  which  increase  some  of  the  most  beneficent  of 
their  powers,  as  we  use  agents  more  and  more.  But 
the  agent's  community  does  not  of  itself  lead  to  that 
consolidation  of  various  agent's  communities  into  one 
system  —  that  consolidation  which  is  characteristic 
of  the  banker's  community.  A  large  increase  in  the 
number  and  complexity  of  agent's  communities  is  com- 
patible with  a  large  increase  in  the  rivalries  of  these 
communities.  There  are  various  dangerous  pairs  of 
such  communities  which  one  finds  in  the  commercial 
world;  and  these  have  emphasized  a  large  number  of 
international  jealousies. 

Before  the  minds  of  all  lovers  of  humanity  there  has 
long  stood  a  vision  of  a  Federal  State  formed  on  the 
basis  of  the  existing  states.  Kant  discussed  this 
Federal  Union  of  the  future  in  his  well-known  essay  on 
"Universal  Peace."  But  the  history  of  federal  gov- 
ernment, and  the  modern  rise  of  the  intensely  vigorous 
national  consciousness  which  characterizes  the  world 
of  to-day,  and  the  connection  of  this  modern  national 
patriotism  with  the  rise  of  an  intelligent  democracy, 
and  with  those  very  forms  of  human  solidarity  which 
otherwise  seem  most  encouraging,  —  all  these  considera- 
tions taken  together  make  the  Federal  State  of  man- 
kind seem  farther  away  to-day  than  it  could  have  seemed 
to  Kant.  It  is  not  likely  that  the  world  peace  will  come 
in  the  form  of  a  political  federation  of  all  the  principal 
nations  of  mankind. 

92 


NOTES 

The  lesson  is  that  we  need  to  consider  whether  the 
community  of  mankind  cannot  become  visible  in  the 
form  of  some  other  union  than  an  international  tri- 
bunal can  adequately  represent,  than  the  growth  and 
importance  of  banking  can  fully  exemplify,  than  the 
evolution  and  significance  of  the  modern  communities 
of  agency  can  insure,  or  than  any  political  union 
of  venous  nationalities  can  sufficiently  exemplify. 

This  is  why  the  community  of  insurance,  and  the 
international  board  of  trustees,  with  its  wholly  non- 
political  type  of  union,  and  with  its  freedom  from  the 
obligations  of  an  international  court  of  arbitration,  seem 
worthy  of  consideration. 

V.    (See  page  78) 
"THE  FIRST  ACT  OF  WAR" 

I  lay  no  stress  upon  any  detail  regarding  the  formula- 
tion of  the  rule  which  I  thus  tentatively  state.  I  my- 
self do  not  know  how  to  define  with  any  generality 
wherein  a  first  act  of  war  should  consist.  For  the  pur- 
poses of  the  present  Address  I  lay  no  stress  whatever 
upon  any  question  regarding  the  moral  guilt  of  any 
nation  that  is  supposed  to  begin  a  war.  It  would  be 
no  part  of  the  interests  which  the  international  board 
of  insurance  would  represent,  to  read  to  the  nations 
any  moral  lesson  regarding  the  rights  and  wrongs  of 
their  past  and  future  wars.  The  whole  case  upon 
which  the  present  Address  insists  is  this  :  — 

93 


NOTES 

The  nations  will  gradually  acquire  a  definite  loyalty 
to  the  community  of  nations,  and  a  definite  conscience 
regarding  their  obligations  to  one  another  whenever 
they  begin  doing  such  business  with  one  another,  as 
insurance  at  present  best  exemplifies  and  tends  to  foster. 
Whenever  such  forms  of  business  come  to  exist,  the 
reasons  why  a  wise  nation  will  be  indisposed  to  make 
warlike  trouble  for  itself  and  for  other  nations  will 
become,  with  time,  clearer  and  clearer.  On  the  other 
hand,  as  soon  as  the  nations  are  in  a  position  to  begin 
any  form  of  the  business  which  insurance  represents, 
there  will  be  more  and  more  objects  coming  into  sight 
to  which  such  forms  of  business  can  be  extended.  The 
process  thus  initiated  will  be  cumulative.  If  such  a 
process  once  were  initiated,  it  would  not  be  subject 
to  the  explosive  accidents,  which  have  suddenly,  and 
with  a  discouraging  violence,  interrupted  the  advances 
heretofore  made  towards  substituting  judicial  settle- 
ment of  disputes  for  war.  For  this  cumulative  pro- 
cess would  not  wholly  be  founded  upon  the  authority 
of  judges,  nor  upon  the  fragile  interests  which  might 
for  a  time  make  some  form  of  international  federation 
attractive,  but  which  would  be  only  too  likely  to  be 
interrupted,  whenever  dangerous  pairs  of  peoples  or 
of  races  became  too  conscious  of  their  hostilities,  and 
hence  reasoned  that  these  hostilities  must  be  "holy." 
The  cumulative  tendency  towards  organization  which  a 
board  of  trustees  would  exemplify,  —  when  once  it 
had  been  made  trustworthy  (which  is  humanly  pos- 

94 


NOTES 

sible),  safe,  and  independent  of  political  responsibilities, 
—  this  cumulative  tendency  would  not  be  subject  to 
such  explosions  and  catastrophes  as  have  beset  all  the 
forms  of  international  organization  thus  far  devised. 

In  order  to  form  a  plan  for  making  this  type  of  organ- 
ization efficacious  in  discouraging  the  beginning  of 
war,  I  have  proposed,  merely  as  one  of  numerous  pos- 
sible provisions,  the  plan  of  writing  the  international 
policies  subject  to  some  such  rule  as  the  one  mentioned 
regarding  the  "first  act  of  war."  Any  other  formula- 
tion which  made  a  desirable  policy  such  that  it  would 
be  vitiated  in  case  the  nation  holding  the  insurance 
rights  in  question  voluntarily  did  anything  which 
experience  showed  to  be  productive  of  an  actual  war  — 
any  other  formulation  of  an  analogous  rule  —  would 
serve  the  purpose  here  in  question.  This  purpose  would 
be  not  directly  to  vindicate  the  moral  law,  or  any  partic- 
ular principle  of  international  law,  but  to  issue  a 
policy  of  a  form  that  tended  to  discourage  the  begin- 
ning of  a  war.  For  the  best  teaching  of  international 
morality  must  take,  at  present,  indirect  forms. 

The  principles  of  the  insurance  trustees  would  be 
wholly  business  principles.  They  would  teach  loyalty 
by  keeping  loyally  their  trusts  themselves,  both  to 
the  nations  that  were  their  clients  and  to  mankind; 
and  by  putting  the  nations,  so  far  as  they  could,  in 
such  business  relations  with  one  another  that  the  na- 
tions concerned  would  find  it  advantageous  to  behave 
in  a  businesslike  fashion.  The  nations  have  grown 

95 


NOTES 

self-conscious  enough  to  form  at  present  pairs  that 
are  more  dangerous  than  ever  before  in  the  world's 
history.  I  propose,  by  certain  devices,  to  get  them 
to  do  plain  and  profitable  business  with  one  another 
by  means  of  some  community  of  interpretation.  I 
emphasize  the  community  of  insurance  simply  upon 
empirical  grounds.  That  community  has  now  proved 
itself  the  most  fruitful  of  all  communities  of  interpre- 
tation, in  substituting  businesslike  motives  which  turn 
out  to  be  both  reasonable  and  ideal,  for  motives  which, 
until  insurance  was  invented,  were  hopelessly  subject 
to  capricious  interferences  and  to  dangerous  conflicts. 

If  any  other  community  of  interpretation  can  be 
named  which  will  serve  this  purpose  better  than  a 
community  of  insurance,  and  an  international  board 
of  trustees,  the  purpose  of  this  Address  and  of  these 
Notes  will  have  been  wholly  accomplished,  so  soon  as 
any  one  can  successfully  define  such  a  community  and 
induce  a  group  of  nations  to  give  it  suitable  work. 


96 


''I  "'HE  following  pages  contain  advertisements  of  a 
few  of  the  Macmillan  books  on  kindred  subjects 


The  Problem  of  Christianity 

IN  TWO   VOLUMES 
By  JOSIAH  ROYCE,  LL.D.,  Litt.  D. 

Professor  of  the  History  of  Philosophy,  Harvard  University;  Author  of  "  Out- 
lines of  Psychology,"  "  The  Philosophy  of  Loyalty,"  "  William  James,"  etc. 

Vol.  I.      The  Christian  Doctrine  of  Life. 

Vol.  II.    The  Real  World  and  the  Christian  Ideas. 

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A  work  of  great  importance  to  all  students  of  religion  and  philosophy 
and  to  the  general  reader  who  keeps  abreast  with  progress  in  these  fields 
is  Dr.  Josiah  Royce's  "The  Problem  of  Christianity,"  in  two  volumes, 
the  first,  "The  Christian  Doctrine  of  Life,"  and,  the  second,  "The  Real 
World  and  the  Christian  Ideas." 

Volume  I  is  a  study  of  the  human  and  empirical  aspects  of  some  of  the 
leading  ideas  of  Christianity;  Volume  II  deals  with  the  technically 
metaphysical  problems  to  which  these  ideas  give  rise.  The  two  volumes 
are  contrasted  in  their  methods,  the  first  discussing  religious  experience, 
the  second  dealing  with  its  metaphysical  foundations.  They  are,  how- 
ever, closely  connected  in  their  purposes,  and  at  the  end  the  relations 
between  the  metaphysical  and  the  empirical  aspects  of  the  whole  under- 
taking are  reviewed. 

The  "Christian  Ideas"  which  Dr.  Royce  treats  as  "leading  and  es- 
sential" are,  first,  the  Idea  of  the  "  Community,"  historically  represented 
by  the  Church;  second,  the  Idea  of  the  "Lost  State  of  the  Natural  Man," 
and  the  third,  the  Idea  of  "Atonement,"  together  with  the  somewhat 
more  general  Idea  of  "Saving  Grace." 

"These  three,"  Dr.  Royce  says,  "have  a  close  relation  to  a  doctrine 
of  life  which,  duly  generalized,  can  be,  at  least  in  part,  studied  as  a  purely 
human  'philosophy  of  loyalty'  and  can  be  estimated  in  empirical  terms 
apart  from  any  use  of  technical  dogmas  and  apart  from  any  metaphysical 
opinion.  .  .  .  Nevertheless  no  purely  empirical  study  of  the  Christian 
doctrine  of  life  can,  by  itself,  suffice  to  answer  our  main  questions.  It  is 
indeed  necessary  to  consider  the  basis  in  human  nature  which  the  religion 
of  loyalty  possesses  and  to  portray  the  relation  of  this  religion  to  the 
social  experience  of  mankind.  To  this  task  the  first  part  of  these  lectures 
is  confined,  but  such  a  preliminary  study  sends  us  beyond  itself. 

The  second  part  of  these  lectures  considers  the  neglected  philosophical 
problem  of  the  sense  in  which  the  community  and  its  Spirit  are  realities." 


PUBLISHED  BY 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers        64-66  Fifth  Avenue         New  York 


"  A  POWER  IN  THE  BUSINESS  OF  LIVING,"  says  the  New  York  Tribune  of 

The  Philosophy  of  Loyalty 

By  JOSIAH  ROYCE,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

Professor  of  the  History  of  Philosophy,  Harvard  University ;  author  of 

"  Outlines  of  Psychology,"  "  The  Conception  of  God," 

"  The  World  and  the  Individual,"  etc. 

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"The  ethical  value  of  loyalty  needed  discussion,  especially  as  so 
much  so-called  loyalty  is  mere  self-delusion.  To  be  loyal  in  mere 
words,  or  negatively,  to  the  shell  of  an  outworn  convention  is  not  to  be 
loyal  at  all,  or  wise.  Moreover,  true  loyalty  must  express  itself  practi- 
cally, in  the  way  of  a  man's  life,  in  his  deeds.  Cherished  without  rea- 
soning, and  to  no  really  practical  purpose,  it  avails  nothing.  The  drift 
of  circumstances  that  may  make  a  man  of  high  and  strong  personal 
qualities  a  power  for  lasting  good  in  a  community,  or  develop  him  as  a 
harmful  influence  to  society,  does  not  escape  Professor  Royce's  attention. 
The  present  significance  of  his  book,  therefore,  is  evident.  .  .  .  The 
author  disclaims  the  idea  of  making  a  text-book  or  an  elaborately  tech- 
nical work  of  philosophical  research.  The  appeal  of  the  book  is  to  all 
readers." — New  York  Times. 

"  A  thoroughly  sincere  attempt  to  set  clearly  before  the  American 
people  the  need  for  aiming  at  the  highest  ethical  ideals  in  their  daily 
life,  in  their  intercourse  with  one  another,  and  in  their  relations  with 
the  outside  world.  Believing  that  certain  present-day  conditions  and 
tendencies  indicate  a  lowering  of  individual  and  national  standards, 
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constructive  criticism.  His  programme  of  reform  is  summed  up  in  the 
single  phrase  —  the  cultivation  of  a  spirit  of  loyalty.  .  .  .  His  work  is 
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CONTENTS 

MARINE  INSURANCE  ACT,  1906. 

MARINE  INSURANCE  (GAMBLING  POLICIES)  ACT,  1909. 

HISTORICAL  SKETCH. 

COMMENTARY  ON  THE  MARINE  INSURANCE  ACT,  1906. 

NOTE  ON  THE  MARINE  INSURANCE  (GAMBLING  POLICIES)  ACT,  1909. 

ALPHABETICAL  LIST  OF  LEADING  CASES. 

CHRONOLOGICAL  LIST  OF  LEADING  CASES. 

SUBJECT  LIST  OF  LEADING  CASES. 

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RINE INSURANCE. 

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ON  GENERAL  AVERAGE. 

GENERAL  INDEX. 


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